Email setup for small business

glitch

glitch

glitch

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8 Nov 2005
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At the moment I'm working from a simple webmail system managed directly from the domain, but as the business grows I'm going to need to sort out something a little more efficient and scalable. But I'm slightly lost when it comes to even looking at the options.

This is what I'd be looking for said system to do:

Multiple email addresses and inboxes
Mail routed to any mailbox of my choice
Users able to view multiple inboxes at the same time
Users able to send mail as/from any email address
'Sent items' for each mailbox
Contacts shared across all users
Shared folders for standardised emails/responses/etc
Mobile access via BlackBerry, etc
Ability to send mail from databases/website and have messages appear in the 'sent items' of the mailbox in question

And this is what I'd like it to do, but wouldn't be essential features:

Personal and group calendars with group permissions for appointments
Both plain text and full HTML formatting options for email
Out of office responses
Automated responses from certain inboxes/addresses

So what are my options? Am I looking at something expensive or horrendously complicated?
 
I'd thought about it but wasn't sure that it would do everything I needed it to; specifically the multiple users/multiple inboxes thing.

I've spent a few hours looking round the site but can't find an exhaustive list of what it can do and what it can't.
 
That was the only thing I wasn't sure about. :( It looks like Google specifically don't give out much info so you have to contact them to ask for more info. ;)
 
The sneaky devils.

Assuming Google don't offer what I need through Apps, do you know of any alternatives I could look into?
 
Yes. :p

I would have suggested using a domain name and just running Thunderbird or Outlook off it but you said you want webmail. I've no idea on that really. I'd only know about domain hosts' versions of webmail. Certainly nothing as advanced and complicated as you need.

If it didn't have to be a webmail system, would Outlook work? I'm guessing you need it for mobile staff or something if you are asking for webmail?
 
MarcLister said:
I would have suggested using a domain name and just running Thunderbird or Outlook off it but you said you want webmail. I've no idea on that really. I'd only know about domain hosts' versions of webmail. Certainly nothing as advanced and complicated as you need.
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Do I want webmail? Sorry, I hadn't realised I'd asked for that. Apologies if I've confused matters.

MarcLister said:
If it didn't have to be a webmail system, would Outlook work? I'm guessing you need it for mobile staff or something if you are asking for webmail?
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I'm sort of thinking Outlook would have to be the front-end as I know it would fulfil most of the criteria. It's more about what's powering the email system that worries me and if it would be as flexible as Exchange when it comes to setting up mailboxes, users, permissions, etc.

There's no staff that are constantly mobile, but it would be nice to be able to send and receive email when out and about. Staffing would be two main users (with additions along the way) and various 'generic' mailboxes for different enquiries coming in and emails going out.

Lucero said:
Without pushing the expense of Exchange (and associated CALS, SBS2003 / 2008) a lot of web hosting services now offer exchange functionality. Could be worth looking at that??

Example from my host

http://www.tsohost.co.uk/exchange-hosting.php

Then just use Outlook clients
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Now that looks like the sort of thing that might work. If the host doesn't offer it, can you get third-parties who would?

Ev0 said:
As above, a hosted exchange could be a good way to go to keep costs down. Usually pay per mailbox, places like www.cardium.co.uk offer it, as well as loads of others.
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Ah, so that sort of answers my last question to Lucero.
 
That's good news then! Do you have any knowledge/experience of these issues?

Users able to view multiple inboxes at the same time
Users able to send mail as/from any email address
Ability to send mail from databases/website
 
glitch said:
Users able to view multiple inboxes at the same time
Ability to send mail from databases/website
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Don't know what those are, sorry :p
glitch said:
Users able to send mail as/from any email address
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That's a good feature. You can send mail as if it were from any other email account. So for example, you can send an email from your apps account, but it will look as if you've sent it from your hotmail address to the recipient.
 
asim18 said:
Don't know what those are, sorry :p
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I'll explain.

Users able to view multiple inboxes at the same time would mean I could see my personal inbox and any of the generic (info@, sales@, etc) inboxes at the same time. And any other user (of my choice) could also view the generic mailboxes while I was 'in' them.

Ability to send mail from databases/website would be that I could get my database(s) and website to generate and send mail to customers automatically, via the same system as the rest of the email.

asim18 said:
That's a good feature. You can send mail as if it were from any other email account. So for example, you can send an email from your apps account, but it will look as if you've sent it from your hotmail address to the recipient.
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So, in effect, I could be in any mailbox on my domain and make it look like I'd replied from any other mailbox?

Would the reply stay in the mailbox it was received in or be moved to the one it was sent from?
 
glitch said:
Do I want webmail? Sorry, I hadn't realised I'd asked for that. Apologies if I've confused matters.
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You said you were currently using a webmail system. I probably saw that and assumed you still wanted webmail. :p

glitch said:
I'm sort of thinking Outlook would have to be the front-end as I know it would fulfil most of the criteria. It's more about what's powering the email system that worries me and if it would be as flexible as Exchange when it comes to setting up mailboxes, users, permissions, etc.
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Is Exchange out of the running for costs?
 
glitch said:
That's good news then! Do you have any knowledge/experience of these issues?

Users able to view multiple inboxes at the same time
Users able to send mail as/from any email address
Ability to send mail from databases/website
Click to expand...

Well having an exchange hosted product iirc is effectively like having your own exchange server for those mailboxes, so anything you can do in Exchange you could do.

So viewing multiple mailboxes would be fine, get the host to add in the right perms then you just add extra mailboxes within outlook.

Same for the other stuff, all things that are configured server side which the host would do I'd imagine, or if they have some kind of control panel for you to admin it yourself you can sort it all.

I've not used this myself however so forgive me if those things aren't available with a hosted exchange solution.
 
glitch said:
At the moment I'm working from a simple webmail system managed directly from the domain, but as the business grows I'm going to need to sort out something a little more efficient and scalable. But I'm slightly lost when it comes to even looking at the options.

This is what I'd be looking for said system to do:

Multiple email addresses and inboxes - yes, in exchange you create users and assign them email addresses, the only caveat here is that when sending mail the mail will always appear "from" the default SMTP address
Mail routed to any mailbox of my choice - depends what you want, mail is routed to which object has the email address assigned, so if you assign an address to a user and a mail is sent to it the user will receive it. You can get around this by creating distribution lists/groups with mutliple members, or by forwarding mail from one user to another user/group/contact
Users able to view multiple inboxes at the same time - this is not a problem, with exchange you can set full mailbox rights for one user over another and they can then open these accounts up as additional mailboxes in Outlook. Setting up permissions can be time consuming at the start though but you can give a group full mailbox permissions over a user and then just modify the group members
Users able to send mail as/from any email address - this is a seperate permission to full mailbox access but this is definitely possible, the way this works is that if you open an email in someone else's mailbox and reply it will automatically try to reply as them, but you can send mail as someone else "on demand" by just adding their name into the from field assuming you have permissions.
'Sent items' for each mailbox - as standard every user/mailbox gets their own set of folders
Contacts shared across all users - this is trickier, every user has their own contacts lists so you can share these between other users on the exchange server, however if you want to centralise contacts for sharing you should look at using public folders instead...
Shared folders for standardised emails/responses/etc - again probably public folders are best for this
Mobile access via BlackBerry, etc - yes, we run some BES servers that allow for this, there are costs involved though from both us and the mobile provider. Windows Mobile and iPhone can also use activesync to connect to mailboxes over the internet
Ability to send mail from databases/website and have messages appear in the 'sent items' of the mailbox in question - Unfortunately this isn't something exchange can do out of the box from what I have seen, you could perhaps get around this by forwarding a copy of the mail to the user and running a rule on the server to filter this to the relevant sent folder though

And this is what I'd like it to do, but wouldn't be essential features:

Personal and group calendars with group permissions for appointments - Every user has their own calendar and these can be shared between others much like contacts, you can also configure users to work as resource calendars which means they act as a meeting room that can auto accept/decline meetings.
Both plain text and full HTML formatting options for email - yes
Out of office responses- yes
Automated responses from certain inboxes/addresses - We have disabled this to avoid mail loops being generated

So what are my options? Am I looking at something expensive or horrendously complicated?
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I happen to work for one of the largest hosted exchange providers in Europe, judging from your requirements hosted exchange will do most of what you want but not everything, i've put notes next to things it can and can't do :P

http://www.cobweb.com if you are interested
 
Sorry for the late reply. Had a couple of busy days which were great for business but bad for getting back to anyone.

Ev0; I was actually referring to asim18 in my 'good news' post, but you've answered a couple of other questions I had anyway, so I think you for that.

Eulogy; I've looked at that cobweb link and it all seems very clever, but it looks expensive. Would I be right in saying that it's £X.XX per mailbox store but I could have multiple SMTP addresses attached to each one? I.e. I have one main 1GB mailbox (or whatever size) and info@, help@, returns@, customerservice@ email addresses all routing to that mailbox for no extra cost?

And say I had all those SMTP addresses in operation, would I be able to reply as them or would any reply go out as whatever SMTP was the primary one for the mailbox? It's been ages since I was doing exchange admin so I've forgotten what the options are or how it works.
 
Additionally, what would it cost me to set up my own Exchange Server and run that? And in addition to the cost, what would the hardware and bandwidth requirements be?

The situation is that I've got two people with 'personal' email addresses (name@domain) and I'm currently running three 'generic' addresses (info@domain, help@domain, orders@domain) which all route to a single mailbox.

I'd like to be able to still retain the two personal mailboxes and either have one massive mailbox that all the generic addresses send to (but still be able to send out as any of them) or individual mailboxes for each generic address, but give various permissions to various users in terms of access and the ability to 'send as' those accounts.
 
glitch said:
Additionally, what would it cost me to set up my own Exchange Server and run that? And in addition to the cost, what would the hardware and bandwidth requirements be?

The situation is that I've got two people with 'personal' email addresses (name@domain) and I'm currently running three 'generic' addresses (info@domain, help@domain, orders@domain) which all route to a single mailbox.

I'd like to be able to still retain the two personal mailboxes and either have one massive mailbox that all the generic addresses send to (but still be able to send out as any of them) or individual mailboxes for each generic address, but give various permissions to various users in terms of access and the ability to 'send as' those accounts.
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Hi Glitch

Yes you pay per mailbox but additional SMTP addresses and domains are added at no extra cost, so you could have one user with 500 email addresses if you want :p

When sending mail it will always be sent as the users default email address, there is no feature in exchange yet to let you send as alternate email addresses assigned to a mailbox.

You can work around the problem above by creating groups, adding an email address to it, and then giving it member(s). You can then give the users send as permissions over the group and they can just send as that (outbound) and mail will still be routed to the member(s) of the group (inbound)

Bit confusing when you first start but hopefully you get the idea :D

As for installing your own exchange server, it's possible and I think in a small environment you can get away with hardware that is not too fancy, i've installed Exchange 2003 in a VM running Windows Server 2003 and it wasn't too hard, however even if you put your own server in you have to consider how outbound mail is sent out, will you have a smarthost to root outgoing mail? if not you may hit blacklisting issues as most mail servers block connections from IP's that are in dynamic ranges.

I couldn't say for sure exactly what hardware you needed though :P

To be honest i'd say setting up internal exchange server wasn't really worthwhile for only a couple of users, the time and expense of purchasing and implementing a server, supporting it, running backups etc, if you don't have a clue on any of these things it could be quite troublesome! but on the flip side it would be a great learning experience and latency to an internal server is always going to be better than something hosted elsewhere, however our servers are hosted in a T1 datacentre in London (telehouse to be precise) so connection shouldn't be a problem, and cached exchange mode is designed for this (downloads mailbox to local machine so it's faster to retrieve items etc)

Also you have to consider things like spam and what type of connection you have, if you host your own server and your IP address is not static you may find you suddenly stop getting mail when your IP changes! same for if your internet connection goes down, no redundancy etc. Spam could be a problem if you don't have any filtering in place :)
 
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