Free Lightweight Windows Email Server

sidethink

sidethink

sidethink

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Joined
13 Apr 2007
Posts
961
Location
Belfast, Northern Ireland
I need to setup a free mail server for a friend that has to run on a Windows XP or 2003 server (he won't have Linux and can't afford anything major).

Its sole purpose will be to deliver email reports from a business application that can generate up to 3000 mails per day. Currently, his ISP, BT is a bit flakely when the report engine just dumps these emails at their SMTP host.

I've heard that BT SMTP is a bit flakey at the best of times and I'd like to try an local SMTP host to handle more reliable delivery of the mails (and retries of any failures).

I've tinkered a little with the SMTP host builtin to IIS and it works ok, but is having trouble sending mail to certain domains (that work ok from other hosts).

Anyone out there have any experience of a lightweight, free SMTP server for Windows?
 
If it's just to send stuff out (not receive anything in) I'd say cygwin and ssmtp. If you don't want to forward to your isps mail server, then most basic sendmail setup...
 
Yeah, I just need to send mails - I can set the reply to address to come in via his webhosted domain mail.

I really just need an SMTP host that can handle a few thousand mails per day and will auto-retry badmail (the IIS host seems to have issues with badmail and is very difficult to manage and poke around in).
 
a lot of recipient mail servers will reject these mails because when it does a reverse dns lookup on the source ip, the domain won't match what's in the email. - unless you have reverse dns configured with the isp. not likely given you mention BT - or is it a business package?
 
sidethink said:
Yeah, I just need to send mails - I can set the reply to address to come in via his webhosted domain mail.

I really just need an SMTP host that can handle a few thousand mails per day and will auto-retry badmail (the IIS host seems to have issues with badmail and is very difficult to manage and poke around in).
Click to expand...

Try Mercury http://www.pmail.com/overviews/ovw_mercury.htm.

I wouldn't worry to much about forward and reverse records matching, (but make sure you do have valid forward and reverse records!) very few host check for matching records but many more will check that there is a valid reverse record for the IP address.
 
I used to run a mailserver from home until I discovered Google Apps which now acts as my mail server for my domain. I signed up for the free account, it does mention ads but I've not had any at all in my emails.

You have to have control of your domain's DNS and point the MX records and CNAMEs to Google's servers.

http://www.google.co.uk/a
 
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