A lot of small businesses are faced with the challenge of using email effectively. The difficulties in turning email into a useful tool stem from many places. If the following list of problems sounds familiar, this article might save you hours of heartache in the coming months.

Does your business: 

* Run off a shared broadband connection ?

* Has it's email hosted with your ISP ?

* Have a small number of employees with a need for some basic groupware functionality ?

* Have employees with 2 or more PC's that need to sync mailboxes / calendars etc... ?

* Need to share mailboxes between employees ?

 

Please note: this article is only a broad overview with all the specific installation and configuration details taken as assumed knowledge. For more details please enquire via the contact us form. 

 

 

A number of the small businesses that we've been fulfilling support contracts for have been complaining to me that they are having problems getting the most out of their email. The reasons for this are many, but they all have the common component that it revolves around small (usually home) businesses that could initially get by with a handful of users connecting to the internet, accessing their email directly from either their ISP or hosting company which usually implies that you will have extremely limited mailbox capacity on their servers. Within the first 6 months of operation at Resonance Networks, we found that our mailbox sizes were already exceeding 1GB. Given that our first website / mailserver was hosted with only 400MB of storage (with 20MB inboxes for each employee), this presented us with the need to move to some sort of external mail server with a large capacity.

 

 

This method requires the least capital outlay and takes a modeate amount of server and client configuration. 

 

You will need:

* A modem / router capable of port forwarding

* An old PC at least 400MHz, 256MB RAM, 10GB HDD space, ethernet adapter

* A tape drive (LTS/LTO) if available 

* An email client capable of applying filters to incoming mail across multiple accounts (optional)

 

The following diagram is a representation of the setup we are looking for: 

 

 

Basically what we are doing here is using the mail client (on each user's PC) to connect to the server with which the mail is hosted and download the mail into Outlook / Thunderbird / KMail / Whatever... and then use filters to move the mail across to
a folder on the company mail server.

 

The local mailserver can be a cheap PC with a collaboration suite installed on it. For example:

* Kolab * OpenXchange * Zimbra * Scalix *

This mailserver should have accounts setup on it so that they mirror the accounts on your hosted server. You should also allow access to the server via IMAP and/or IMAPs. This will allow the clients to access and sync with the mailboxes on this server from anywhere inside or outside the network.

 

In order to save space on your hosted server, you will most likely want to be accessing these emails via POP3 so that it deletes them from the server after download. Then your filters should move these new messages into the inbox of your IMAP server automatically or whatever folder you so desire. For outgoing mail, just use the same SMTP server that you are currently using.

 

On your router, forward the IMAP and/or IMAPs ports to your mail server so that people can access it from outside the network. 

 

This process also makes backups for the entire organisation's emails easy. Simply backup whatever folders are necessary on the mail server via any method you deem necessary (tape, DVD-RW, etc...) and because most of the data will be text you will get excellent compression ratios of the backups. As a general rule I just put in crontab:

 

 

if you have any questions about this articles we'd be glad to offer assistance wherever we can, simply go to contact us and fill in the form.