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Email has become an integral part of any company over the past years. Still, I notice that many companies, especially the smaller ones, are not aware of the benefits of having your own mail server. Especially many smaller companies with only a few employees often use email services from their ISP (Internet Service Provider) which leaves them with an address like mycompany@aol.com or BillG@bellsouth.net.

For many people, this does not encourage the thought of a professional company. The simple fix is to register a domain name and use that name as your email domain. The Internet is a storefront in a similar fashion as a physical location, and first impressions tend to last. Having your own domain name to send email from is much like having a professional stationary.

The question at this time is what can be used to set this up. As soon as your company is more then a few people, it may already be worthwhile to set up your own mail server. A big misconception is that this absolutely has to be a dedicated server: Especially when the company is still small, a minor piece of software can be installed on an existing machine to take care of email distribution.

What are the advantages of having your own domain name, with regards to email:

• You can maintain the SAME email address, even if you decide to move to an other city, state or even country.

• All employees can have their own email address under the same domain, showing that they actually work for the company. Using personal email addresses is a bad idea no matter what, as when people leave the company, your customers will keep communicating with them through their address books..

• This email domain is independent of the provider you use, and if there are no good options available, you can easily host it yourself.

• If you are forced by circumstances to give up your address or phone number, customers will continue to find you through your consistent email address.

• Post your most recent address details on the website that corresponds to your email address.

• An email address that makes sense will keep communications going with the customers that have approached you in the past.

Thus, given these examples, it is obvious that it is easier to maintain long-term relationships when you use an easily identifiable email address. If you do not like the thought of a provider storing your email, you can easily do it yourself by setting up in internal email/communications server.

So, what are the advantages of having your own communications server?

• Sending and receiving mail will be done on the local network. This can be especially helpful if you have a slow connection to the Internet, as the mail server will handle delivering and receiving messages from the Internet, while the end users can continue working without delays.

• Storage limits are limited to your own specifications, not to what a provider decides. If you want/need more storage, add more hard disk space to the mail server machine.

• Your information is not in the hands of a third party. This is a double-edged sword: When your emails are in the hands of a third party and this is a reputable company offering business services, they most likely offer a backup solution, thus securing the availability of your archives after something happens. But, if this company goes under or a natural disaster takes down their data center, what happens to your archives? Where can you access or retrieve them? When setting up your own mail server and taking sufficient backup measures, you are always assured that your data is recoverable.

• Having your own mail server can allow a company to use additional features such as mailing lists, catalogs, auto responders and more. Mailing lists (or distribution lists) allow for somebody to send an email to 1 address, while the mail server takes car of distributing it to the right people. A simple example is an address like: sales@mycompany.com - In most cases, this address is a distribution list, as there are multiple people that receive the message. This in turn assures that a sales request gets handled, even if the primary person responsible has the day or week off.

• Many mail server products can integrate fully or partially into the Active Directory (AD). This is the part in Microsoft Windows networks that -amongst others- takes care of user names and passwords to log on to Windows. When using a mail server that supports AD integration, the password of the user will be synchronized between their Windows account and their email account so they will have only one password to remember.

One of the largest and most wide-spread 'mailserver' products is Microsoft Exchange. Besides being a mailserver, Exchange can do many, many more things which makes it a great messaging platform that offers great integration with other (Microsoft) tools. However, this great functionality comes at a price, both in licensing and in hardware requirements, that may end up to be the bottleneck for many smaller companies, especially when only email is required without further bells and whistles.

For these companies there are alternatives available, both commercial and Open Source, that will offer similar functionality at a fraction of the price.

Commercial Alternatives

In the commercial realm, there are software programs such as MDaemon by Alt-N Technologies or the Merak Mail Server. Both products offer everything you would want from a professional messaging suite at very reasonable prices. Both products support all the basic mail functionality and - at an additional price - additional services such as spam filtering and virus scanning. The advantage of having your email server scan incoming and outgoing messages, is that an email-born virus will be caught by the mail server at the moment that it comes in, so it will never get through to clients. Client virus protection will capture messages that find their way passed the server so they cannot infect the client PC at that time either.

Both products have licenses available that start below USD 200, but depending on your requirements in functionality and/or user base, this price may increase to over USD 2000.

Either way, these commercial products are highly successful and will be very much worth the investment. Product support is available by phone and licenses come with an 'upgrade protection plan', which includes free upgrades for the time period specified.

Open Source Alternatives

The Open Source mail server world seems to be dominated by Linux-based alternatives. All of these products adhere to the Unix way of thinking: Do one thing and do it well!, instead of offering a swiss army knife that can handle everything. Thanks to this viewpoint, there are many different programs that all take care of a small piece of the email puzzle: receiving mail, sending mail, offering mail to clients over POP3, offering mail to clients over IMAP4, web mail, etcetera.

Even though there are many how-to documents, describing all sorts of combinations that all try to achieve the same thing (providing a fully functional mail environment), unfortunately I have not been able to find a fully functional, out-of-the-box, free and/or Open Source solution for Linux.

The remarkable part about this is that these packages are readily available for Windows! The reason for this seems to be that Windows users have grown accustomed to the swiss army knife approach, leaving them with less flexibility but more ease of use.

Mercury/32 is a very basic mail server that strongly adheres to available standards and that holds a viewpoint between the Unix and the Windows approaches: It is a mail server that does not offer web mail or web-based administration, but many Open Source products can be used to take on these responsibilities. Mercury/32 is VERY lightweight and takes up very little resources on an existing system, making it a great solution for basic email implementations. This package is not (yet) Open Source Software but can be downloaded and used freely.

An other product that I am very impressed with is hMailServer. hMailServer is a true OSS product, using the earlier mentioned MySQL database as the storage facility for mail and users. If you do not have MySQL installed already, the installer will automatically install a minimal copy of MySQL for you. hMailServer uses open source virus protection (a product called Clam AV) that can be installed with one click during setup. Various open standards are used for spam protection, which can be configured almost as easy as the anti virus functionality.

Cost Factor

Whatever way you choose to go, commercial or open source, it will be the TCO that decides what the best option will be. Generally speaking, an email server only needs to be touched or maintained when users are created or removed. Regular maintenance on the client side, like cleaning out old messages and saving attachments in a folder instead of leaving them in the email client, will make sure that the system will remain responsive and running problem free.

Changing from a general email address to a personally owned one is often approached as a problem, since existing customers all use this address for communication. To avoid confusion on the customer side and make the transition seamlessly, the following checklist will help:

• Create an auto responder on the old address that indicates the new address.

• Have messages from the old address forwarded to the new address. If this is not possible with your current hosting provider, have your mail server download the email from the account and distribute the collected emails to the new accounts.

• Set up a personal signature that informs clients about the address change and request them to update their address book. A better option for a multi-user environment is to configure your mail server to add this signature (or disclaimer) to all outgoing messages.

• Replace the old address on all communications and publications. When referring to email, only speak about the new address.

After several months, you will find that the number of emails received on the old account will drop to zero. When you feel comfortable that your client base has updated their details, which can take anywhere from weeks to years depending on the approach, the signature and forward can be deleted. If the old address is free, leave a permanent auto responder in place stating that this mailbox is no longer in use with a reference to the new address. This way, any emails coming in from new customers that have found your old address somewhere online, will be informed to re-send the message to the proper address.

Even though you may employ the best system administrator out there, there are things that many companies do not take into consideration: Regular maintenance performed by the user WILL make your TCO go down, as maintenance on the server side becomes less necessary. Look at it this way: If all the employees in your company would simply keep their desk and the 1-foot floor-section around their desk clean, the caretakers would need less time to clean up after hours - maybe even change from coming 3 times a week to only once -, which in turn would save the company money.

Once again: Having good policies in place and using a mechanism to enforce them cuts TCO in half.