Mail store and forward providers

rG-tom · 6 Jun 2010 at 07:48

Hi there,

I'm moving my e-mails over to exchange 2010 at the moment, but at least for a few months it is going to be hosted from a non-business line. It's 50/1.75 so speed isnt an issue, and in the 9 months I've had the connection, my IP hasn't changed once, so fairly static, but I can't guarentee it wont randomly change one day or be down for extended periods.

Where I work, all of our clients are on Message Labs, which is a great service that works twofold: firstly it has fantastic spam filtering, and secondly in the event that the exchange server is uncontactable, it stores emails and forwards them as soon as the connection is re-established.

Now, as great as it is, it's way beyond my budget.

My web hosting is a cpanel based one and does have some email forwarding options for use with exchange, but it isnt clear if it stores in the event of failure to deliver?

If not, what other options are there? There will only be one domain and <5 mailboxes.

Thanks guys,

Tom.

EDIT: Actually, looking at the cpanel set up more, this option looks interesting:

Baclup Mail Exchanger
Configure server as a backup mail exchanger. Mail will be held until a lower number mail exchanger is available.

Is this doing what i think it is? Set the IP of my exchange box as a low number MX, and have my webhosting as a higher number MX record and voila redundancy?

bigredshark · 6 Jun 2010 at 19:23

The service is becoming more unusual as backscatter moan about it as a technical concept (which means many providers offering it don't bounce undelivered messages anymore, which is unhelpful). It's not a bad option, I'd consider just getting a cheap VPS, installing exim and routing mail through that (which also avoids setting a dynamic IP as your MX, which is really bad practice security wise anyway) - £15 a month or so and no hassle as long as you have some unix clue

Seaniboy · 6 Jun 2010 at 22:31

Postini would probably fit the bill

rG-tom · 7 Jun 2010 at 09:51

bigredshark: Good suggestion but @ £15 a month it's too expensive, that's more than hosted exchange would be, and definitely more than messagelabs!

Seaniboy: I'd somehow not thought of Postini , I'll look into that looks spot on!

Tom.

s0ck · 7 Jun 2010 at 09:56

pobox.co.uk will do exactly this. I've used it for clients with small (read as none) budgets and it works brilliantly.
There's no flashy web interface and email responses are sometimes a bit slow but what you do get is the ability for POBox to sit as the MX entries and they will feed mail via SMTP to the WAN IP you provide; your WAN IP is hidden in this respect.
You can then amend your firewall to the POBox/24 for added security.

It's ridiculously cheap and they do a bit of anti-spam too.