Consortium hosted mail v Internal Exchange

You'll have to forgive my ignorance on this - i'm two days into new job and already have a major project to undertake!

Like most consortium led schools we have email limitations in place (which i believe is 50mb per mailbox) - the Head / Deputy would like to implement an internal Exchange server with the thought that this would "release" the limitation, but at the same time continue to use the services provided by the LA (internet / filtering) as well the email services provided by the county before it hits the new internal server.

Would this work? Admittedly i havent put any legwork into this yet but i cant see how this would work unless we completely opted out and did everything independently.

Has anyone else done this?

You could set up an exchange server and have your LA point their MX records at your server. You would then be able to use their filtering on the mail but have it come in on your server so that you could have larger mailbox sizes.

Contact your LA and ask if they are willing to forward the ports. Some get funny about forwarding ports on the main network. Exchange is simple enough to setup if you follow the guides just take your time with it.

Hi,

As you're EMBC all you need to do is ask them and they'll make it so.

Thanks everyone - that sounds relatively good news.

Just need to find the money now! :)

The finances were what has stopped me doing it this year as the new email provision via EMBC is a shambles.

If finances are a problem and/or you'd like a better product, consider the open-source email and collaboration suite, Zimbra.

We migrated to it in April for both staff and students - feedback very positive and no problems at all. AD integration and a custom C# program to provide pre-authentication means users don't even need to type their username/password when logging in at the school.

Another vote for Zimbra here, moved our old linux/exim/cyrus/squirrelmail to zimbra at easter and the teaching staff love it.

Also authenticates against our AD as well.

I'm playing with zimbra but its finding the time :(

Having watched the Zimbra demo it looks fantastic and certainly fits the bill.

So has anyone gotten their LA to point the MX records at a Zimbra server? Any issues?

EMBC have done similar for us with our Zimbra.

I bought a new domain, spoke with EMBC and pointed the MX to mx1/2 .embc.uk.com and they sorted me out an EMF account and set their servers to deliver mail to my internal mailserver.

Works OK on the whole if I had more time I'd get on with it.

Another vote for zimbra - works great (touch wood). Just finished migrating and updating from our old remote server to our lan and also run a webserver off the same box.

Been using the open source (free) version for about a year now and the interface kills squirrel etc. Major difference to network edition is no live backups, but using one of the os scripts, it rsyncs data live, shuts zimbra off in the middle of the night for a minute or so while it rsyncs the small difference, then restarts it, tar's and gzips the folder and ssh's it to a backup box.

Although the spec requirements are steepish (compared to squirrel roundcube etc) and learning how to get it running can be a fiddle, once learnt it's well loved by the other users and me especially.

Yep ... email store and forward to a school hosted mail server is pretty straight forward in EMBC. *All* MX records point to the filter / relay and then this is configured to pass it onto your specified box. It is easier if you are using your .sch.uk domain, but if you are going to do similar to what Kim has done (set up an internal test system first) and you want EMBC to manage DNS (Kim manages his own IIRC) then you need to use a .uk domain. .co.uk and .org.uk are easiest to deal with. .org or .com will need you to manage DNS or the DNS forwarders and it gets a bit ... interesting.

Under the previous folk it took me nigh on 15 months to sort out moving to EMBC due to difficulties over domains. Thankfully that is not an issue now as I know what the rules are.

Surprisingly, with DurhamNET it was easy (as they own the domain and manage DNS for it). MX records are configured to their own mail handling servers which then forward everything to our school internet IP.

For testing, I used a personal domain who's DNS is handled by Afraid.org; and just directed the MX/A records to our internet IP.