Looking for email SERVER

[CWuestefeld]

I'm looking for a free or very cheap mail server.

For years I've been using the since-discontinued "FTGate", and it has been working well. However, as was discussed in another recent thread, software that's good one day may no longer be satisfactory the next because of a changing technological environment.

(Explanation hidden so as not to hijack my own thread, when I want to talk about email servers rather than DNS)

Spoiler

In my case, it's because the email my server sends out is frequently considered spam by the recipients' SMTP servers, apparently because my DNS entries (PTR record, maybe?) doesn't validate my home IP address as a legitimate sender for my domain. I can't really fix this because (a) I'm too ignorant of DNS, but more importantly, because (b) even if I could get the DNS set, I'd have a problem with my home's dynamic IP address.

The one fix I'm sure of is that, rather than send my mail directly to the recipients' servers, I can relay it through my hosting provider (GoDaddy)'s SMTP server. But their servers require authentication, which FTGate doesn't support.

What I'm looking for:

• Ability to retrieve POP3 mail and put it into the corresponding mailbox locally. Leave a copy on the server for a day so I can see it from work, too.
• POP3 server
• Outgoing SMTP authentication, including the ability to use a username that is an email address (some servers have you input credentials as "username:[email protected]", but can't parse it properly if the username is an email address that itself contains an "@")
• Light RAM consumption

Bonus points awarded for

• IMAP server
• Other means of sharing data in a "public folder" kinda thing
• Web mail, especially WAP
• Remote (web) administration

Can anyone in DC land suggest any free/cheap email server that satisfy these?

[Ralf Maximus]

How many mail accounts?  If 5 or less, SurgeMail is ideal, and free for up to 5 users.  10 users costs $175 USD, and it scales up from there.

It does everything you ask for, and is incredibly rock-solid & reliable.  Remote administration via locally-served web page interface.  Low resource footprint, too: I run one on an old Penitum-II box with 256M of RAM and it's very happy.

Highly recommended.

[Renegade]

Mercury Email Server - Free, but not an NT service. Quite good.
Argosoft Email Server - Very inexpensive and very good. I use this. Not good for massive volumes. (There's a new .NET version that increases performance)
SmarterMail Email Server - Good server. Free for 1 domain. Can handle high volumes better than Argosoft. Uses a web interface for configs (yuck).
Postfix - Free. Can handle massive volumes. Difficult to setup compared to others. Runs on *nix.

All of those will more than satisfy your requirements.

[Renegade]

Ooops - not sure about WAP for those servers above - you may need something else. Argosoft and SmarterMail both have webmail interfaces. Postfix probably needs something else - not sure, but it's one mean mother beast for heavy heavy duty use. For Mercury, you'd need to check on web interface and WAP.

[f0dder]

So...

do you just need a piece of software, or a host to host it on as well? Googling for FTGate tells it's a windows app, so I guess that's a requirement... otherwise, I'd probably have gone for a mix of dovecot, postfix, and throw some greylisting (and perhaps spamassassin) ontop.

[justice]

Google apps for your domain can do what you want and prices start from nothing. However I've got no experience with it.

[CWuestefeld]

Thanks for all of the suggestions so far. Here's my score card at the moment:

• SurgeMail - I can't see how to make this retrieve POP3 from my GoDaddy. Also, I'd really prefer a GUI admin interface rather than CLI
• SmarterMail - I can't find any setting to allow me to send SMTP via relay rather than direct. It looks cool otherwise, but this is a deal breaker.

I'm still looking at the other suggestions, Google is next on the list. (And yes, Windows was a requirement).

[Ralf Maximus]

SurgeMail - I can't see how to make this retrieve POP3 from my GoDaddy. Also, I'd really prefer a GUI admin interface rather than CLI

-CWuestefeld (November 30, 2007, 09:52 AM)

SurgeMail has a wonderful GUI, all web-based via its internal HTML server.  It's similar to the web-access email client you can configure for users, but with administrator control panels.  EVERY feature can be configured via the HTML interface, most without needing a restart.   Looks a little like Yahoo's web 1.0 mail client; simple but effective.

And while it's not an email client (and thus isn't designed to retrieve mail from other servers) there's a shootload of add-ins that do all sorts of clever things.  Don't write off SurgeMail quite yet.

[CWuestefeld]

it's not an email client (and thus isn't designed to retrieve mail from other servers)

-Ralf Maximus (November 30, 2007, 09:58 AM)

Actually, that's is exactly what I want. My host presents a POP3 mailbox for me. I want to pull from this into a mailbox on my (in-house) server; I use Outlook to retrieve mail from that. In other words, rather than having other servers SMTP to me, I pull via POP3 from a host.

[f0dder]

What's the server running, CW?

I guess it's windows, but otherwise you could check fetchmail.

[CWuestefeld]

I found an alternate approach to solve the problem. There's a freeware proxy for SMTP that allows me to intercept my server's transmission and rebroadcast it using a properly-authenticated login (it also proxies POP3, but I don't care about that).

See "X-Ray mail assistant" at http://www.xrayapp.com/xray/.

[yksyks]

I'm using for similar reasons 602LAN SUITE by http://www.software602.com/. As far as I know the last free version for up to 5 users is 2004.0.06.1017. It's running here for years without any problem. Serves as a web-mail server, proxy and NAT, by the way. Remote access via web browser is also possible.

[Arjen]

hMailServer seems like a very good option for a Windows mail server.

Good luck!

[Edvard]

Afterlogic's Xmail looks nice, and it got a ref from Shellcity...
http://www.afterlogi...bee/xmail-server.asp

Basic features:

    * SMTP server (ESMTP supported)
    * POP3 server
    * TLS/SSL secure connections
    * Support of multiple virtual mail domains and accounts
    * SMTP authentication (clear-text, secure, POP-before-SMTP)
    * Logging
    * Account aliasing
    * Domain aliasing
    * Remote administration
    * Cross-platform (Windows, Linux, BSD, etc)

Advanced features:

    * Simultaneous multi-user access to a POP3 mailbox
    * Finger server
    * SMTP protection against spammers (IP-based and e-mail address based)
    * Public blacklists: RBL/RSS/ORBS/DUL
    * Mailing lists
    * Flexible message filters
    * Custom mail processing
    * SMTP ETRN command support
    * Custom POP3/SMTP authentication
    * POP3 account synchronizer (fetcher)

[PhilB66]

This one just came through the rss feed... hope it is useful for someone.

Macallan Mail Solution is a freeware Mail Server (SMTP/POP3/IMAP/HTTP/NEWS/SSL/Tunnel) for Windows XP Windows 2000.