Hey hey. The company I work for in Durban is busy trying to replace their existing mail solution to an in house server. The current pop system we have (pop forwarding) uses a linux box in the building and all the mail is forwarded to an outside company and runs through their servers. It is slow as hell and drops all the time + we want mail stored and backed up centrally. So at the moment we have been quoted for a Microsoft SBS 2003 server.

A few issues with the sbs option. Firstly you are limited to 75 users, which we would be under at the moment. Total mailbox size is 75gb max, so 75 users total would be getting 1gb each so its going to have to have some sort of mail backup/archiving attached to it too. Of course the other thing is the cost. A 5 pack of CAL's is just under R4800, roughly R1000 per user. We also have a few agents off site who currently use our .co.za too and it seems insane to pay R1000 for each of them to keep using the co.za

Heres what we have been quoted for:

Intel Pilot point 4 5U pedestal 550w
Intel server board sapello-r xeon dc 8dimm
2X Intel xeon 5420 - 2.50GHz ACT (Dual Xeon)
2X Trancend 1GB DDR2-667 FB-Dimm
2X Seagate 500GB Saa 3.5" HDD with 32MB Cache
DVDRW drive

For a total of 19995.00 (ex vat)
SBS 2003 + 5 CAL 5490.00 (ex vat)
CAL 5 pack R4795.00 X 10 (ex vat)
So starting total of 55 CAL

Then we talking say R4000ish for server config and getting an uncapped 512 dsl line for mail
+ they want monthly rental for their linux firewall box of R750


Now, my questions. First off, I would like to get some other quotes to give my boss. Personally I think a linux box running a solid mailing app (with a GUI) would be a better plan. SBS is going to give more control over the PC's in the office and let us get central updating and some access control done, but the main function is mail, and we talking R80 000 ex vat for a exchange solution.

Linux firewall box off the quote (Montly rental - linux firewall with vpn solution lan to lan. Includes hardware rental, internet reports/monitoring/content filtering, secure vpn tunnel to branch, proxy server) at R750 a month to me seems a bit overboard, can anyone confirm what something like this should cost ? I dont see why it should be monthly, I mean reports/monitoring etc is pretty easy for someone here to do, the rest is really 1 off setup right ?

Are there any companies in Durban offering Linux mail solutions ? Basically I am trying to track down decent people to get quotes off, so if you work/own a company doing this sort of stuff please let me know.


Any other suggestions would be welcome, I am pretty out of the game when it comes to servers, I know my way around (studied mcse/ccna crap) but I work here as a graphic designer, so I am just helping them by giving advice and listening to quotes etc, I dont want to set it up myself, busy enough doing gfx design as it is I dont need to be yelled at if/when the mail stops working

Have you considered the Hosted Exchange product from MWeb?

Give them a call, it might be the solution for you.

I was gonna say, contact your local ISP's. Pretty much all of them will offer an exchange/mail solution.

I agree - it will most likely also include backup options. However, if you did want to roll your own you could easily set up a linux/bsd mail server that would do just fine. There are tons of web gui's available for all the major smtp/pop/imap daemons..

Thanks for the advice, I did have a very brief look into hosted exchange. Going to take a proper look now thanks for that suggestion

The only downside to a hosted exchange is that everybody will be connecting to the "internet" to get their mail.

In my humble opinion, you don't need a super high spec pc to act as a mail server, in fact a standard bare bones tower pc would be fine, especially if all it will do is act as a mail server for less than 75 people. (the bottle neck will almost always occur on the network layer, not on the server. an old pentium 2 can process much faster than any network cable/nic can deliver info to it.)

Windows SBS 2003 comes standard with POP3/SMTP goodies. The only thing you will have to do regarding the 75gb drive space, is when setting up user e-mail accounts, there is usually a setting in the mail client where you can stipulate whether you would like it to leave a copy of the mail on the server or not. to save space i would suggest NOT. That way all your user's will have their mails in their locally stored .pst files.

Always admired a smart girl and no Luschious i'm not sucking up to you

Sorta defeats the purpose of backups

Not really, you can create a backup policy for users to follow, making them save their .pst files on a backup server. Although we all know how good users are at following policy, so you do raise a valid point none the less

Exacertly!