Moving from External email to internal email -

[StumpedTechy]

Anyone want to give me a brief rundown of possible scenarios and issues that may arrise by moving from an eternal email housing to our internal email server?

Currently we have our own domain name. The emails get funneled to an outside host that keeps them on accounts that they chage 4 doallars per month per account. We are now up to about 400 email boxes.

This is good because a majority of our PC's are not on the domain we have but are on workgroups. so they just connect out to this internet company and get their emails via the internet.

What I want to know is if we turn this email internal will we have to make all machines be on the domain to get emails? Or can I make it so people not on our domain can still log on to get their emails?

Currently we have users setup for the main domain but only contacts setup for each of the outlying centers.

Any thoughts and suggestions on this would help. 1,200$ a month just for them to host emails seems a little excessive (especially when I know about 100 of these are probably able to be purged).

 

[joepc]

Well would you be using ms exchange for mail server? If so you can connect to the server with out being attached to the domain. However you will need to create user accounts in the domain and when a user connects they will be prompted for a user name and password. With this info they could pontentially browse the network and access some shares. You just might want to look into some of that stuff before hand.

 

[TomLet]

I think Exchange (or maybe Communigate Pro by Stalker Software) would be a good option. With Exchange you could have the users connect by using any of a number of methods including Outlook Web Access, POP or RPC over HTTP. With Communigate the options are web interface or POP. Either would work. The previous poster is correct about having to create users accounts for the Exchange option, however standard user accounts have very low privalges in Win/Ex 2000 and 2003. With the Communigate option you are not required to have OS user accounts witch is more secure however the last version of Communigate I looked at did not have the advanced collaberation features that Exchange has. No matter what you will have to create accounts in some form on either system. One advantage of Communigate is the cost, if you do not mind having a disclaimer in each message you can use the trial version of Communigate forever. Of course a lot of this depends on your existing systems. I hope this helped a little.

Tom

 

[jonbush]

Hi, just my thoughts...

if you are already used windows servers, then a move to exchange would probably be a wise move...you could probably re-organise your network and buy a new powerful server to deal with your e-mail, and after 6 months it's paid for itself by saving you 1200 bucks a month !

as for users accessing the network for the mail, i agree with joepc's comments earlier, there should be no problems at all, domain accounts would be nice...but not essential, if you have remote offices, there are always VPN solutions that are free....and web access for e-mails is standard, and with exchange 2003 its just like outlook...

hope this helps

J.

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[StumpedTechy]

Thanks we already have an internal echange server so I think moving it in is a good idea. thanks for giving me some thoughts on remote connections in. Next question is spam stopping software or lockdown. With our emails being hosted we have not had to worry about spam once we go in house I think this will need to hcange can anyone give me some good tips on site to puse and what to implement to stop this spam?

 

[TomLet]

If you are using Exchange 2003 Microsoft has released a free spam add-on called Intelligent Message Filter SmartScreen™ for the server found here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...F1-48C9-4E43-A4EB-82D9A83FD4A7&displaylang=en

I use it in with Symantec Mail Security for Exchange and between them they catch most of the spam we get. The Symantec product also does anti-virus and content filtering.

Tom

 

[StumpedTechy]

THanks I'll look into it. When you say most whats your average % you would say you catch? Also how much "tweaking" does it take to setup?