E-mail solution for WHS?

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jebo_4jc

New Member
Apr 18, 2011
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What would be the best/easiest way to host e-mail on a WHS (either v1 or 2011)?

My brother helped me set up e-mails using Exchange at our own family's custom domain. It is currently hosted at his house. But, reliability issues have caused me to consider other options.

I'm not opposed to using a cloud solution, as long as the messages can be downloaded and archived to the local WHS, and we can keep our custom domain e-mails.
 

Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
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For e-mail, I would *highly* recommend using a box in a data center rather than something at home. Residential internet connections are unreliable, which means people sending e-mails may see them bounce. Best bet would be to use some hosting provider cloud or otherwise, then download e-mail archives to the WHS. Every modern e-mail system will have this since it is a required e-mail server feature to be used in any business.
 

PigLover

Moderator
Jan 26, 2011
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+1 for Patrick's point. Look for an ISP that will mange your domain name and host your E-mail for you. That is the best approach unless you really want to set yourself up as a 24x7 support person for your home & family.

If you really must run an e-mail server on WHS, look at "hmailserver" (google it). Windows based, reasonably flexible and complete, fairly easy to manage. In addition to running as an email server, it can act as a relay server working with your "hosted" email service. For example, if your hosted service only offers POP3 but you want something more flexible like IMAP, hmailerver can be set up to collect your emails from the hosted service periodically and then present them to your email client using IMAP.
 

zicoz

Member
Jan 7, 2011
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I played around with an in-house Exchange server (Have technet subscription so I didn't need t o pay full price for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange server) a while back, and I got it working. The way I got around the blacklist issue was to use my ISPs smtp server as the ougbound server. I ended up moving to Google Hosted Services in the end though, just because I wanted to have the entire family on the domain and not have to be an admin for it.