What's the advantage in running your own email server? I currently run email for several domain names using my web host's setup. It works well. However, there must be some reason that people run their own email server otherwise they wouldn't do it!
Advantages in running own email server
- Thread starter Bluecube
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The main reason is due to the IP itself. On a shared web hosting account for example you'll have so many accounts all using one IP to relay mail. All it takes is one person to not have a secure password and that IP will get blacklisted.
You can get a dedicated IP to avoid the issue. Its also a control thing I guess where people want to run on non-standard ports and you can encrypt the mail stored also.
Some other reasons are cost. if you want the simplicity of cpanel to manage accounts etc then its something like £10 a month just for cpanel itself then you've got to either rent a VPS to host it on or a dedicated server.
Some will go with office and a exchange server so it works better with outlook for more than just mail. now with office 365 they'll host the email for you.
I personally mostly use my gmail and IMAP the domains I do have via a shared hosting account. As I use the gmail for the majority of important things.
But I've run mail servers for company's I've worked for and the reason they do it as it was mostly internal communication and the last thing you want is 250 email accounts going out via the single connection when it doesn't need to. So thats the main reason businesses will use a dedicated server internally then either relay via a spam filter or direct to other mail servers.
You can get a dedicated IP to avoid the issue. Its also a control thing I guess where people want to run on non-standard ports and you can encrypt the mail stored also.
Some other reasons are cost. if you want the simplicity of cpanel to manage accounts etc then its something like £10 a month just for cpanel itself then you've got to either rent a VPS to host it on or a dedicated server.
Some will go with office and a exchange server so it works better with outlook for more than just mail. now with office 365 they'll host the email for you.
I personally mostly use my gmail and IMAP the domains I do have via a shared hosting account. As I use the gmail for the majority of important things.
But I've run mail servers for company's I've worked for and the reason they do it as it was mostly internal communication and the last thing you want is 250 email accounts going out via the single connection when it doesn't need to. So thats the main reason businesses will use a dedicated server internally then either relay via a spam filter or direct to other mail servers.
I think I misread your first post. Are you hosting email for other people, or are you just using mail servers provided by your web host for your own uses?
I don't think there are any reasons why the majority of companies in 2015 couldn't move to Office 365 or Google Apps for their email needs - the security fears are irrelevant because by the nature of the service it has to be accessible over the internet, and the messages are only ever going to be as secure as the weakest server or client device that they are stored on, so it's not worth getting paranoid over when the person who you are discussing your latest commercial venture with prints all their emails out and leaves them on a train.
There may be very specific reasons to keep Exchange running in-house, such as legacy apps that need to connect into it directly and don't work with Office 365, but for the most part I trust a team of people supporting a product which is critical to the future success of a company such as Microsoft more than I trust myself to run a mail server in house with the associated DR site, backup, and capital hardware costs.
I don't think there are any reasons why the majority of companies in 2015 couldn't move to Office 365 or Google Apps for their email needs - the security fears are irrelevant because by the nature of the service it has to be accessible over the internet, and the messages are only ever going to be as secure as the weakest server or client device that they are stored on, so it's not worth getting paranoid over when the person who you are discussing your latest commercial venture with prints all their emails out and leaves them on a train.
There may be very specific reasons to keep Exchange running in-house, such as legacy apps that need to connect into it directly and don't work with Office 365, but for the most part I trust a team of people supporting a product which is critical to the future success of a company such as Microsoft more than I trust myself to run a mail server in house with the associated DR site, backup, and capital hardware costs.
I'm currently using my web hosts servers for my own use. They work fine but I'd like a push email facility. And, as per my original post, I was wondering about any advantages. I hadn't thought of Office 365 or Google apps. Just off to look at them right now.
If it's for your own use then either look at Exchange Online Plan 1 (it's a mouthful) which is Office 365 but with just the email part and cost £2.50 per month per mailbox (plus VAT), or jump on Amazon WorkMail while it's still in preview.
Google Apps doesn't really work with push unless you have Android or use the Gmail app on iOS, or go through a reasonably long winded setup to get it to use ActiveSync, at which point message flagging stops working.
Google Apps doesn't really work with push unless you have Android or use the Gmail app on iOS, or go through a reasonably long winded setup to get it to use ActiveSync, at which point message flagging stops working.
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But there isn't any advantages apart from learning how to run them if you do run them in a production environment.
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Even for enterprise organizations, the advantage of running email in-house are not clear cut. I can't imagine why anyone would want to run it just for personal use unless just because they wanted to.
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Hosting something like an email server isn't for the faint hearted and you need a little bit of knowledge before starting to build one. The list can go on forever for requirements. You also need to be able to troubleshoot. If something goes wrong and you don't understand it enough then there will be no-end of problems.
I have a few SMB clients who still have crap ADSL connections to their offices out in the sticks.. In-house Exchange works for them, I would hate to try to placate all those Office365 connections over such low throughput lines.
Likewise if the internet goes down a lot of businesses still like the fact they can continue to email internally. Saying that, with cloud being so centric these days, I always try to install dual WAN where possible.
Likewise if the internet goes down a lot of businesses still like the fact they can continue to email internally. Saying that, with cloud being so centric these days, I always try to install dual WAN where possible.
I see being able to pick up a smartphone or go home and still get your email as a much better situation to be in than an SMB being able to email internally so that five people can stay in the office when the Internet is down and…do something that doesn't need Internet connectivity I guess.
Sorry, the argument of hosting a mail server onsite due to bandwidth constraints never made sense to me. Firstly email isn't that demanding, it all ends up coming from or going to the Internet at some point, and especially with remote working being A Thing now, you get to push everything back up a crap pipe to get it to people's phones.
People will whinge more about email delays or issues than anything else, trusting it to whatever the modern version of SBS server is in an environment that is unlikely to be anywhere close to a datacentre at the far end of some damp string belongs firmly in the mid-2000s.
Sorry, the argument of hosting a mail server onsite due to bandwidth constraints never made sense to me. Firstly email isn't that demanding, it all ends up coming from or going to the Internet at some point, and especially with remote working being A Thing now, you get to push everything back up a crap pipe to get it to people's phones.
People will whinge more about email delays or issues than anything else, trusting it to whatever the modern version of SBS server is in an environment that is unlikely to be anywhere close to a datacentre at the far end of some damp string belongs firmly in the mid-2000s.
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Sure, some valid points there, but to play devils advocate.. Say you are on Office365, If you have a thirty person office and a single person sends a 10MB attachment to an internal distribution group which feeds fifteen mailboxes then all of a sudden you have 160MB of bandwidth being used for a single email.
As for a recent horror story, I had a client come aboard recently who already had an in-house RDP server supporting 10 users. These 10 users all had access to the *same* four mailboxes all hosted on Office365. They receive a lot of picture attachments as part of the job, and like to file these received emails in a strict folder hierchy.
Literally every large email that came in had to be downloaded ten times. Then someone would file the email, and a big resync would take place. First thing we did was convert that RDP server to a VM and upload to a remote server.
Generally I like hosting email servers on fat, remote pipes, but when the client doesn't have the bandwidth its not always the best solution.
As for a recent horror story, I had a client come aboard recently who already had an in-house RDP server supporting 10 users. These 10 users all had access to the *same* four mailboxes all hosted on Office365. They receive a lot of picture attachments as part of the job, and like to file these received emails in a strict folder hierchy.
Literally every large email that came in had to be downloaded ten times. Then someone would file the email, and a big resync would take place. First thing we did was convert that RDP server to a VM and upload to a remote server.
Generally I like hosting email servers on fat, remote pipes, but when the client doesn't have the bandwidth its not always the best solution.
Ok, now that one person sends the 10Mb attachment to fifteen external users and you have 150MB of email trying to go up an ADSL line, which is going to be roughly 10% of the speed of the downstream.
The bandwidth argument doesn't work because email is bi-directional by nature. If you were really that bandwidth constrained you would soon decide that the way to get a 10MB file to everyone in your team was a folder share on a NAS, but good luck convincing people that you email to download stuff off your OneDrive/Dropbox/whatever instead of just receiving an attachment.
Not to mention that unless you're using a service like Mimecast (costs are picking up now), every single piece of spam has to make it as far as your server before you can reject it.
The bandwidth argument doesn't work because email is bi-directional by nature. If you were really that bandwidth constrained you would soon decide that the way to get a 10MB file to everyone in your team was a folder share on a NAS, but good luck convincing people that you email to download stuff off your OneDrive/Dropbox/whatever instead of just receiving an attachment.
Not to mention that unless you're using a service like Mimecast (costs are picking up now), every single piece of spam has to make it as far as your server before you can reject it.
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The cost of connections for businesses these days is next to nothing in the UK. The purchase of the hardware + cost of getting it setup may as well be spent on something like a better net connection with hosted external email. I know not all locations in the world can get good internet but most businesses operate inside cities/towns.
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I was pretty much a Linux noob until relatively recently and decide to build my own server etc. to learn about it. I got pretty comfortable with most things and decided to add a mail server to my setup. I've got it running fine but it's the one part of my server setup that I really struggle to understand. It's definitely not for the faint-hearted!
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It actually works quite well with cache mode outlook.
We have a number of construction sites over 3G/satellite /adsl, it works fine.
