MrClass wroteyou guys don't read or what? HE WANTS A MAIL SERVER THAT WORKS ON WINDOWS.
YOU DONT SEEM TO BE THAT SMART! YOU CAN RUN POSTFIX/SMTP OVER CYGWIN ON WINDOWS IF LINUX IS SUCH A TABOO. OR DID YOU EVEN CONSIDER VIRTUALIZATION FOR ANY OTHER REASON? WHAT A LOAD OF CRAP.
you asked for it so here it comes:
- email infrastructure is majorly composed of a mail client a mail server and possibly a mail relay or a proxy. but most of the time a mail server runing smtp and whatever you choose in between pop and imap. a mail client could be the likes of thunderbird, outlook or even gmail! a mail server is devided into two, the receiving end which is the smtp, it receives, relays, etc. and the deliverer such as postfix. if you consider the size of an average email, it cant be more than 20-50kb in size. the reason im mentioning this is to point that it is very small in comparison to loading your facebook page which is well over a 1mb! in a small office, if you have let say 50 people, each send and receives 10 emails a day= 500emails at an evarate size of 50kb=25mb of traffic.
so during working hours, 25mb over 8hrs=an average of 3mb of email each hour. arriving spam will be at least ten fold. for that you need to use the likes of spamassassin and for antivirus antivir. in linux, you get all those almost prefconfigured, just type in your name. with virtualization, you abstract the email services from a hardware and hosting os, hence you can run with one operating system on top of another without issues. this gives you flexibility for migration, for maintenance, for a longer lifecycle, easier administration, easier backups. etc.
- old school, new school
it is old school to run deamon services directly on hardware. what you want to do is virtialize. that is new school. what is virtualization? well time for you to wake up and smell the coffee of the age and time that we are living in. for example, if the windows is a must, so be it, install vmware workstation on top and on it install linux for email, linux for web proxy linux for this and linux for that, the total? five different and independent operating systems and configurations running concurrently on the same hardware. each is a separate appliance serving a dedicated function, or then again, it can be all in one as you best see fit to your day to day work. you can even download and use legally esxi, you can run all these in a more efficient manner if performance is an issue.
- microsoft exchange server, a hog, its even a nightmare to properly deploy in large enterprises, yes you can have it out of the box with next next next, but god help you when you need to get your hands a bit dirty. not to mention that its a resources hog. the only time you have an excuse to use exchange is when you have a clear need of enterprise communication and integration requirements. forms/calendars/relays etc.
- its a small office! you want to install a dedicated server for each function? that is like having a server for every 3 people, OMG put a limit to this idiocy! just as NUC already stated, one box is more than enough, one box can even serve 50ppl or even a hundred of properly configured!
- internet traffic? where is the issue? your hardware has more bandwidth capacity than your ogero connection, presuming its an 2/8/10/24mb whatever, its still less than 10/100/1000mb which a nic can handle and linux can handle. you can run dozens of websites with a high level of hits on web and mail serving hundreds and even thousands of people just over an a 4mb connection. yes back in the old days, big isps were runing over 2-4mb symmetric connections.
do you want me to go on? cause of i will, you will be fried!!
