Offsite Email Hosting w/ Internal Exchange

[nokona13]

I know this place isn't supposed to be an advertising forum or anything, but I have a serious question, so I thought I'd ask it.

The monopoly telecom in the country I work is my only available ISP. I have my own internal exchange server, and I need register my domain and have someone else host my DNS (dial-up only here). The telecom here wants US$5/mailbox/month to host mailboxes for my clients, so that my exchange server can just dial in and download all messages at scheduled times and I can deal with the mail myself, while maintaining complete control over my internal exchange system (ie internal messaging, calendar, resource reservation, etc...). Looking around the web it seems most places that offer off-site mail either offer some kind of POP3/domain alias thing where they'll host mail for you at you@yourdomainalias.*** or they want to offer full, off site exchange services. I found one british company that will do pretty much what I want for much less than the above price, but they also offer lots of other stuff and want some control over how I do things. Plus they're literally on the other side of the world (12 time zones away), probably not conducive to excellent transfer speeds (I know I know, network distance and map distance don't always correlate, but still...). Does anyone have a couple of places I might go that will offer me just simple mail hosting and let me keep full control of my own exchange server?

Thanks!

Matt

 

[Marcs41]

Maybe a silly question, but, you have the money to spend on an Exchange Server, but not for an ISP?
Regardless of the price, it must be peanuts compared to a server.

Marc
[sub]If 'something' 'somewhere' gives 'some' error, expect random guesses or no replies at all. Please specify details.
Free Tip: The F1 Key does NOT destroy your PC![/sub]
How Do I Get Great Answers To my Tek-Tips Questions? See faq219-2884

 

[nokona13]

All the money here comes from grants for education from the governments of the US, Australia, Japan, and a few others. These grants rarely support recurring costs. Before I got here someone got some grant money to set up a single server machine with win2k server and exchange, but then left and until I got here there was noone around who could even figure it out on the job (what I'm doing).

So the point is, the machine's here, but now any recurring email costs are going to come out of the internal education budget, which is pretty limited. Plus, I want to get this up and running, and asking for $2500/year for email will be a lot harder to fund than $500 or less, which it seems like I might be able to do...

Any suggestions?

 

[Marcs41]

I did not mean to get that explicit of course, I was just wondering how you were budgetting, but that explains it well.

OK, to keep it as cheap as possible:
Start with a (free) dial-up account with an E-mail address somewhere, does not matter what or where, it is just to get your connection.
Next, you need to register a Domain, which is optional, no-one stops you from using Exchange with a number of yahoo accounts, but it is not so 'nice' of course.
Get your domain where they host your DNS as well, so that is not an issue either.
Depending your country, there must be several, but don't let borders stop you as it does not really matter where the DNS is setup.
At your Domain host, you have all mail forwarded to that (free) account (*@yourdomain.com to whatever@freemail.com).
Then you need some POP retrieval software to get all the mail from that (free) account and get it into the Exchange server.
Check out

http://www.christensen-software.com/

with prices starting from US$ 59. There are alternatives but this one is very good.

Now, you have email for your domain, and if you play it right it will only cost you $59 for the POP application and $30 or so for the Domain.

In your exchange server, you create a recipient policy to handle your domain and it will distribute all mail@yourdomain.com to the users (actually PopCon will do so).

OK, now, if you have $500 max. I would urge you to consider a DSL connection at least, if it is available where you are. This because either dial-up cost may be high and very slow, but if one days some people start sending you large attachments or you start getting SPAM, you ar going to be very very sorry.

Good luck

Marc
[sub]If 'something' 'somewhere' gives 'some' error, expect random guesses or no replies at all. Please specify details.
Free Tip: The F1 Key does NOT destroy your PC![/sub]
How Do I Get Great Answers To my Tek-Tips Questions? See faq219-2884