Is hosting your own email a good idea?

[MoaTad]

In another thread I posted a question about how to go about hosting your own email. I got some good feedback, but now I'm curious as to what people think about it being recommended or not.

Here are my two options:

1) Use Exchange Server 2003 on our network to provide our users with public folders but have them continue to send and receive email via the individual accounts that our domain host gives us. All email, both internal and external would be sent out over the internet via these accounts. (I'm assuming that I could somehow disable the sending of email via the Exchange server)

2) Have our ISP and domain hosting service modify our MX records so that mail to our domain comes directly into our Exchange server, thus hosting our own email. All email sent and received by our users would be sent via the Exchange server, which would route external mail out over the internet and keep internal mail internal.

Any thoughts or alternatives would be greatly appreciated!

 

[dkediger]

#2 gives you the flexibility to change ISP's in a straightforward manner. Not to spread FUD, but I've been a 3rd party observer to a company utilizing their ISP as a mail host when the ISP went belly up.

 

[jpm121]

You could also have the ISP collect inbound messages (possibly do some spam filtering) and then have Exchange go get messages (POP) and put them in the mailboxes. The problem with #1 is that if you change ISPs it means a visit to each desk, plus each desktop has to do virus filtering. Easier to control that on the server, IMHO.

 

[JeremyG]

Before you do option #2, make sure that your ISP will configure reverse-lookups for your mail server.

Many ISP's such as AOL, will not accept mail from domains who's reverse lookup fails.