Take control of your email
Published: 02 May 2003
The availability of broadband, the massive growth in junk email (spam), and the increasing importance of email as a communications tool are all good reasons why you might decide to run your own mail server. At some point, even the smallest business may decide that it needs to take control of its email -- if only because an archive of old email becomes an important business record.
A mail server will allow you to add and change accounts at will, ensure that everyone’s email is scanned for viruses and junk that can be eliminated, and manage internal mailing lists so that company-wide communications get broadcast quickly. You can forward email automatically across the LAN, assign multiple aliases to a single mailbox, and even (in some cases) integrate SMS so that urgent email is sent on to your mobile phone. Users will continue to collect their email with whatever POP3-compatible email client they (and you) choose.
Strictly speaking, the three products reviewed here are not mail servers: they are mail transfer agents (MTAs). Proper mail servers -- applications like Microsoft's Exchange Server or any of a number of Linux programs -- maintain a single store of mail that can readily be backed up for an entire organisation. Mail transfer agents, however, can provide a low-cost alternative for smaller organisations in that they provide many of the same configuration and distribution options of a full mail server. The one drawback is that the store of archived email is held at the client level. If you use an MTA, therefore, you will need to make sure that your backup plan includes all the relevant stores. If your previous system has been scattered email accounts, possibly with each user accessing a different service, an MTA will still be a vast improvement.
Here, we examine three MTA products: VOP3, MailGate and CommuniGate Pro. The first two are British products while the third is American. Although the latter is more expensive than the others, it’s more scalable. If you want to allow remote staff access to the server, you will need a fixed IP address and the ability to accept incoming connections; otherwise, a dynamic IP address is fine as long as the server’s address on the internal LAN is fixed.
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