Mail Server options (long one)

[Gekko_uk]

Right,

A) Sorry if this is wrong place to post, but couldn’t work out best place.

B) Sorry for it being such a long post.

I have two offices, one with 6 members of staff (sat office) one with around 30 (Main office).

In Main office I have Win2k3 Small Business Edition server, running as DNS/DHCP etc.

In Sat office I have Heavy Duty Desktop box running as a file server (running xp prof).

In each of these offices I have 2mb ADSL (s*** upload).

We run a LANtoLAN vpn between these offices, but it is Slow as hell, but enough for what we need it (remote desktop support, overnight file dumps)

Now Our mail/domain is hosted by an out of house provider.

I am having problems working out the best way to manage our email.

Currently all users, use pop3.

I thought about looking into exchange, (small business comes with cut down form of it).

But I don’t know how to get by the Slow speed between offices, i.e. if I have email server in Main office, then mail would have to be retrieved from our main office by the sat office over ADSL.. Which is not too bad, until you start getting large attachments, which they do.

Now I thought about moving PST files onto a shared drive, but then I thought of overhead traffic on networks ) In sat office it isn’t as much of a problem, but in Main office, I thought it may put a bit of a strain on it.

Also, I would imagine it would mean if Server is down, email would not be able to be seen.

Basically I am looking for a way to have a mail server at each site, that will contact the Out of house provider and download their mail to a locally stored mail box, which can then be retrieved internally by the client.

This meaning only one “send/receive” is going out the building at certain periods (eg every 5 mins).

This would then give me a central place to store all the mail for backups.

Also mean if someone jumps to new machine they just have to point to the correct mail server…

Is this possible, if so how…

Many thanks for any help you can offer,

Obviously a solution that uses a free pop3 mail retrieval would be good, and if it allowed spam to be removed, all good and well.

Andy

[Gekko_uk]

anyone?

[cluberti]

If you're talking about Exchange, this can be done with some 3rd party utilities. My favorite is GFI MailEssentials, but there are others (you could even do this with a sendmail box in front of Exchange, if you are so willing).

[-I-]

sound to me you shouldn't, unless realtime shared agendas are critical to your user's neads... if not just buy yourself some email space and let it be hosted on a stable, (cheap) and way-faster server...