External emails - domain/smtp

[pooley]

OK one of my schools have exchange running with an internal email system.

 

The head now wants all the staff and 50%(to start) of the children to have external email access.

 

Can anyone suggest a hosting company that supplies unlimited pop3/smtp (is it imap i need?) email addresses and domain registration ?

 

And if anyones got this allready, how easy/straightforward is it to configure in exchange 2003 ?

 

Cheers guys and gals

 

Si

[ChrisH]

You need you own domain name. Dont you have a yourschool.yourcounty.sch.uk address? You then need your provider to forward all email to your smtp server with your ISPs acting as a secondary to temporary hold mail if yours isnt online etc.

[indiegirl]

I've just registered with http://www.namesco.co.uk for one of my new sites. That was £15 for 2 years for a .com and includes the domain email address.

 

(admittedly, there's just me on this particular domain, but it's enough to start)

[pooley]

Cheers.

 

I think my brain has cooled down now and I can think it throught correctly.

 

 

Our county has split the admin + curric networks via IP.

 

The schoo, has 2 ip address(external) one is the normal web surfing ip the other is not in use yet.

 

So i'm going to have to reg a domain and route all emails through the 2nd external IP address onto my exchange server.

 

I can see me banging heads with the County infastructure team on this one

[DMcCoy]

Yes, if you are really lucky you can have RM keeping your emails hostage like mine.

 

An example. This was Segfl and was incoming/outgoing mail!

 

Received: from mx1.segfl.ifl.net by work!

with SMTP (MDaemon.v2.8.7.5.R)

for ME!; Fri, 05 May 2006 10:53:07 +0100

Received: from smtp.nildram.co.uk (smtp.nildram.co.uk [195.112.4.54])

by mx1.segfl.ifl.net (8.13.6/8.13.6) with ESMTP id k3CLDanu014022

for ME; Wed, 12 Apr 2006 21:13:36 GMT

 

 

Others were help up from the 4th of April. They were not stuck on out internal server.

 

Such fun

[Geoff]

There's also cheaper and better email platforms than Exchange out there now. Consider Scalix or Zimbra for example.

[CyberNerd]

...or possibly use one of those solutions as a relay/virus/spam filter for exchange and have the student accounts on it.

[ajbritton]

@Geoff: Interesting. I notice that both Scalix and Zimbra support Outlook calendar sharing, but not in the free versions. I don't suppose you know of an email service that is free AND supports Outlook calendar??

[Geoff]

No because you need a License from M$. Hence the cost.

[Simcfc73]

I think you just need a Exchange CAL if your using OWA if you don't have outlook which could save you some £££. Thats just in case you don't want to go for the 'better' products that Geoff recommends.

[Geoff]

Zimbra and Scalix have great AJAX based web interfaces. There really is no need to use Outlook with them unless your migrating off Exchange.

[wesleyw]

It also costs big bucks for exchange to be setup as a webmail server another great M$ trick that is!

 

IMAP is needed for webmail so that wherever you are you can see all of your current emails and not realise that the last time you accessed it from a cyber cafe downloaded all your email to that client lol

 

Wes

[webman]

You mean OWA/webmail isn't standard with MS Exchange? Is it possible to use a standard webmail client like Squirrel or Horde to connect to exchange or does MS screw it up using non-standards?

[DMcCoy]

I have made horde/imp work with exchange 2000. It was actually very fast

[wesleyw]

To access exchange from an external source you need to buy a license (It works without one but that's illegal )

 

Wes