Anyone use OSX Server for Email?

[lumencreative]

Does anyone here use OSX Server for Email? How reliable is it?

I currently use Office365 as I got a 12 month free trial but this is coming to an end shortly so looking for a reliable yet cheap alternative.

I'm thinking of giving it a go although I'm just concerned about whether it's stable enough for a business and the lack of a webmail client bothers me a little.

At present, I have 16 accounts set up with Office365 which, even on their cheapest option, would cost me £600 per year. I could reduce these down to 5 accounts and use email forwarding for the rest but that would still cost me almost £200 per year so just need to weigh up whether it's worth the initial outlay for another Mac to run OSX Server.

 

[lumencreative]

One is an email server that you host on your own internet connection with no redundancy, the other is a cloud hosted product that is replicated globally across many data centres - you can't compare them.

Exchange Online Plan 2 (i.e. the email-only option) is £2.60 a month per user plus VAT, which is incredibly good value. I'm not 100% sure you understand the product - do you actually have 16 employees who require email access?

I wouldn't be starting a process of putting anything on OS X Server now anyway, perhaps 10 years ago it was a viable option. Despite what Apple say it is not an appropriate server platform, and all the work we undertake with OS X Server is to move people off of it.

Thanks for your comments. Ideally, we need 16 individual email accounts rather than having several email addresses that forward to a single email account.

Can you please expand on your comments re OSX Server?

EDIT: As I said in my OP, I could reduce the number of email accounts down to 5 by grouping email addresses (such as payments@ and billing@ being alias' under accounts@) but it's not ideal.

 

[lumencreative]

The reason I asked about individual users is because that's how the services is licensed, the amount of email accounts you need on Office 365 isn't related to the amount of user licenses you need to purchase since Shared Mailboxes don't need a license, they are essentially a 10GB mailbox for free that all your users can access.

So, how many actual people will need to log in to this service? That's how many licenses you need.

You're a genuis!! I even spoke to our contact at the Microsoft Partner Network and he didn't mention that to me, so if I go to Exchange Admin > Recipients > Shared and add email addresses in there, they will show up as in Outlook as seperate inboxes won't they?

Fab!!