Mail Server on top of PIAF

[l3iodeez]

Hello all, I am running PIAF in my small business, and I am wondering if anyone has experience running a mail server on top of PIAF. I have been playing around with the Kerio Mail Server Virtual Appliance, and realized that I have a Centos5 box running most of the services I need sitting right here. What I want to have happen is for the box to connect to our webhost's mail server and download all messages to the internal server, while deleting all messages older than X days. Then I want to provide IMAP access to each mailbox on the LAN. I don't need webmail as that is provided by our host. Has anyone done something similar? The other route I am looking at is buying another machine to use as a VM host for the mail server and also and an internal fileserver. Ideas? I am extremely cheap, btw..

 

[rugby]

I'm a Kerio hosted provider and reseller and have done many setups/sales. One thing you need to be careful of with KMS is the sheer amount of files it generates. Each email message, contact, calendar item is a single file sitting in your mailstore folder.

KMS is a full-featured collaborative email server, why would you want Kerio to host IMAP and use your old webmail?

If you want cheap, consider going with a hosted solution. My server sits in a datacenter and depending on how many mailboxes you need it might be worth your while to take a look at a hosted solution.

Here's my current pricing, although capacity is different than what is listed on the site. I am re-doing my website and changing my pricing, so $5 is for 500MB, $7 is for 1GB and $9 is for 2GB mailboxes.

 

[jroper]

I'd be wary of hosting other services on your PBX over and above the PBX for fear of affecting voice quality.

Joe

 

[rugby]

Exactly, I have a raid10 volume I"m hosting my KMS mailstore on due to the sheer amount of small files it writes. The mailstore is also located on a different volume than the boot OS of the server to lighten the load on the boot volume.

 

[jehowe]

If you trust the 'cloud' with your mail, google apps (or Zoho) is both cheap and painless to get going.

 

[rugby]

Having hosted email and set up email servers for several years now I can say that for the most part hosted environments are worth what you pay for them. Gmail has had outages as have other free/cheap hosts. Who do you contact when they go down? Do you have a local rep? Can you communicate with somebody who speaks English?

If your business depends upon a service to be functional, going with "cheap" or "free" is a mistake of galactic proportions. I've had many consulting clients compare my offerings to Gmail and other services like it. I don't compete on price, I compete on the fact that if a server has a problem you get to talk to me and I know what I'm doing.

 

[l3iodeez]

Thanks for the tips. I don't think Im going to risk messing with my PIAF. As far as free (DIY) vs fee, for most I would agree with rugby, but I feel capable to administer it myself, and our company is extremely pressed to save money. Problably we will end up getting another more powerful physical machine to use as a virtual server for email, filesharing, ftp, etc.

 

[wardmundy]

Plug

You're no doubt aware that they're just about giving away hosting services these days. It's well under $100 a year and a lot cheaper AND safer than babysitting your own servers. Virtually all of the cPanel implementations include excellent POP3 and IMAP resources. Nerd Vittles continues to recommend and use BlueHost which now comes with unlimited storage and bandwidth as well as 2,500 email accounts which should meet most users' needs. And, if you sign up through our link, we get a little lunch money to maintain the sites.