Support for small business email server

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Bteam

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Topic # 239343 12-Jul-2018 20:40

I wear the IT hat and most others in a small business and need to upgrade the email system. We use a quasi server which receives and sends email through a single address but distributes the email to the individual addresses in the business. The softwarewe use, Softalk Mailserver, has been sent out to pasture and replaced by another called GMS. To get a trial going I need to get my head around MX and A registers but I don't have the time to trial and error my way through. Does anyone offer this sort of support or can give me some encouragement on how to do it myself?

Thanks in advance,

Stephen

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Reply # 2055355 12-Jul-2018 21:20

Take a look at this... might help a little.

https://www.techopedia.com/definition/5349/dns-record

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Reply # 2055461 13-Jul-2018 00:02

A Record = "This domain name equals this IP address, the basic building block of DNS" e.g. mydomain.co.nz IN A 127.0.0.1

CNAME = "This domain name is actually an alias for another domain" e.g. autodiscover.mydomain.co.nz IN CNAME autodiscover.outlook.com.

MX = "This is a mail server for this domain and it's priority is X" e.g. mydomain.co.nz IN MX 10 mydomain-co.nz.mail.protection.outlook.com.

Information wants to be free. The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

jarledb

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Reply # 2055472 13-Jul-2018 03:46

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I am curious: What is the use case for having your mailserver inhouse these days?

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cyril7

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Reply # 2055475 13-Jul-2018 06:39

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jarledb:

I am curious: What is the use case for having your mailserver inhouse these days?

Snap! crazy idea for a small business

Cyril

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Reply # 2055486 13-Jul-2018 07:34

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I do a bit of small business technical work as a side business, evenings and weekends, including email setup and migrations. Message me if you want help.

My advice though is to move to hosted email, and migrated everything out of your current server. Email is a commodity and is cheap. Have someone else run it for you.

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Bteam

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Reply # 2055495 13-Jul-2018 08:01

Thanks for the suggestions and a couple of offers of help.

To answer the question why do email in house, "It works" and has done so for about 20 years.

That said you've prompted me to start a list of the advantages of the current system and future requirements to see if they can be replicated in a different manner. I guess that's a good place to start. If you offered tangible help I'll contact you independently.

Cheers,

timmmay

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Reply # 2055496 13-Jul-2018 08:03

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If all you want is a bit of advice about A / MX records I can just tell you that stuff. It's easy. Happy to help by messages or here on the thread. Probably better on a message as then you can give exact details of domains / IPs.

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SirHumphreyAppleby

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Reply # 2055497 13-Jul-2018 08:06

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cyril7:

jarledb:

I am curious: What is the use case for having your mailserver inhouse these days?

Snap! crazy idea for a small business

Cyril

No, not crazy at all. I run an in-house mail server at home (and write mail software which people use for in-house and third-party delivery).

The problem with running your own mail server is not the spam, it's the spam filtering that others use. If you are going to run your own server, you must do all of the following:

Use DKIM signing of outgoing e-mail.
Publish an spf record.
Obtain a PTR record for your IP address matching your hostname and A (or AAAA) records for the mail server.

It is worth nothing that none of these are required for SMTP, but unfortunately if you don't do these, there is a good chance your mail will be blocked by someone. The PTR issue is not so common anymore. Just having a PTR is usually sufficient, but you will occasionally run in to configurations which require these to be a strict match.

1101

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Reply # 2055677 13-Jul-2018 11:40

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Bteam:

.... "It works" and has done so for about 20 years.

can say the same for my car.
DOS6 works , as does Win95 .
Be prepared to live with a possibly antiquated substandard , flaky unreliable system . Its 2018, not 1995 :-)

MX & A records etc shouldnt need to be changed , they should/would be correct when the old system was setup...assuming the new email system is also 'in house' .
If you stuff up A records , you may have your website go down , loose remote access and no longer have incoming email .
Your domain hosting service may be able to help with that.

timmmay

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Reply # 2055688 13-Jul-2018 11:47

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1101:

Bteam:

.... "It works" and has done so for about 20 years.

MX & A records etc shouldnt need to be changed , they should/would be correct when the old system was setup...assuming the new email system is also 'in house' .
If you stuff up A records , you may have your website go down , loose remote access and no longer have incoming email .
Your domain hosting service may be able to help with that.

Email queues so you don't lose anything if your system is down for 24 hours. A records usually don't affect email, so long as you have MX records.

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gehenna

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Reply # 2055692 13-Jul-2018 11:54

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Once you've got your immediate need sorted, your next step should be looking into Exchange Online in Office 365. Make email someone else's problem, consume it as a service.

SirHumphreyAppleby

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Reply # 2055712 13-Jul-2018 13:18

1101:

Its 2018, not 1995 :-)

Exactly. Yet time and time again we see examples like the recent Facebook data 'leak', where information is freely and needlessly handed over to third parties in exchange for some service. I see no reason to give Google, Microsoft or any of the numerous SMTP providers my data simply because they claim to be able to magically get e-mail delivered to someone's Gmail inbox. Simply implement best practice, and you'll get your mail delivered.

timmmay

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Reply # 2055713 13-Jul-2018 13:21

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SirHumphreyAppleby:

1101:

Its 2018, not 1995 :-)

Exactly. Yet time and time again we see examples like the recent Facebook data 'leak', where information is freely and needlessly handed over to third parties in exchange for some service. I see no reason to give Google, Microsoft or any of the numerous SMTP providers my data simply because they claim to be able to magically get e-mail delivered to someone's Gmail inbox. Simply implement best practice, and you'll get your mail delivered.

Um, I think you might have the intent of that message backwards.

Moving to hosted 'software as a service' solutions is recommended these days. Many corporates have all of their data in the cloud. Properly secured it's probably safer than most on-premise deployments. Small businesses might have a part time IT person who does other things, and isn't a specialist. You can have a specialist set you up so it's secure and reliable in a service, then places like AWS / Microsoft will have dozens to hundreds of security engineers who make it their sole focus to ensure your data is secure. AWS say "security is our #1 priority".

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jarledb

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Reply # 2056023 13-Jul-2018 23:53

timmmay:

Email queues so you don't lose anything if your system is down for 24 hours. A records usually don't affect email, so long as you have MX records.

Only if the DNS work. If you are doing DNS from in-house as well and someone cuts off your internet service, your email will start to hard bounce.

Pretty sure there are a couple of other ways you can mess it up too.

Not to mention, if your mail server is unreachable the mail server trying to deliver email to it will try with increasing delays to deliver the email. So emails can get delayed a lot.

Using one of the big email services (Google Suite, Microsoft etc) also makes sure that there is less chance of your email bouncing. Most spam-blockers won't blacklist their mail servers, but they will happily blacklist a random SMTP servers ip address left and right on a whim.

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jarledb

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Reply # 2056025 13-Jul-2018 23:57

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Bteam:

To answer the question why do email in house, "It works" and has done so for about 20 years.

Some questions I would ponder if I was you:

How well does it work when it comes to spam and virus filtering?

How well does it work when it comes to delivery of the email?

How well does it work when it comes to keeping the box updated (OS, and all other systems on the server), securing the mail server from hacking etc?

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