Shit’s hit the fan! I was hoping it would all be fine until Christmas..

SBS2003 has gone down, not too much of a problem (only 5 users), except my backup server isn’t built yet.

I’m looking for a cheap/free email server that I can get the clients (outlook) to connect to and download mail from. Mail is delivered to a Pop3 email, so need a server that can take the emails from an internet pop3 and deliver to the correct mailboxes (user@domain.co.uk). It will be running on XP until the SBS2011 is built.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!! Found hMailServer, but not sure if it can do what i need it to…

There will be some uber geeky IT people to advise you – but personally I’d use google mail, and probably never go back to the admin hassle of SBS for a 5 person company.

There will be some uber geeky IT people to advise you – but personally I’d use google mail, and probably never go back to the admin hassle of SBS for a 5 person company.

Our place (of 10 people) has done exactly that. I am aware there may be data-control/security issues, but we don’t deal with anything particularly sensitive and the flexibility, lack of admin hastle and up-time (not a flicker in what must be 6 months now, which is tantamount to magical compared to outages that used to occur – both within and beyond our direct control….) has all been positive.

id say go with gmail as well. simple and easy to setup you can manage all the accounts can be managed by a admin account as well.

My recommendation would be to setup a server on Amazon EC2. You could get an account setup and a server built within an hour.

You can also attached EBS volumes which is a virtual drive. You may script or simply use the EC2 control panel to backup the virtual drive or the entire virtual server.

A basic micro Windows instance will cost you around £10 – 15 per month.

BTW when you setup a server instance the operating system is already installed. Email in profile if you need any other tips on EC2.

I’ve been using vpop3 for about 15 years and it’s been faultless.
It will do exactly what you want and there’s a 1 month free trial as well which may just fill the gap for you.
Gmail is also great – I use vpop3 for my business mail and gmail for personal stuff.

Personally I would buy a cheap PC with a reasonable amount of storage, and download CentOS/Ubuntu and build a new Linux box, it should only take you a few hours to get it up and working, if you know what you are doing.

If you are feeling flush, you could buy two and create a failover cluster, and a distributed filesystem, no need for Windows if you are just running a POP3/IMAP server and SMTP

Phew! Got SBS2003 back up and walking..

Cheers Sharkbait, vpop3 looks what I’m looking for. At least I’ve got some time to put the backup server together now.. I might be able to hold off on the upgrade until Christmas!

Amazon EC2 & gMail are very tempting, I would probably go EC2 as friends use that, but don’t think I will get away with it, as I’ve just purchased SBS2011 & upgrades for the server. I’ll be looking at that next year or year after.

Jimmers you don’t work in Bristol do you? Near the glass boat?