ohjani
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What are the risk of having a mail server?
My management would like to monitor our staff's email content and traffic, thus one of my suppliers proposed to setup a mail server in our office to cater for such purposes. His proposal is to use Merak Mail Server. Being a management team member, i would like to know what are the potential risks and dangers or hassles of accepting such proposal. Our comapny currently has about 40+ internet users, mainly using internet for emails, VOIP, and net surfing. We do not have IT personnel in our company and the email solution we are using currently is webmail. At the moment, we only control our internet traffic using router software. We are running on broadband and fixed IP.
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In short you don't want to do this, and you will what to use http://postini.com/postini_solutions/smb_archive_manager.php with your existing email server.
With 40 employees I don't think you will really get much ROI, by purchasing a server that has some hardware redundancy, Anti-Virus Email Softwrae, Operating System, Anti-Spam, and the monitoring and administration that it will take to patch and harden and maintain the email server. you also stated that you are running off of broadband, if you connection goes down, generarlly so will your email server.
The Postini Solution requires your ISP to perform some configuration changes to first have the email sent to them for archiving, spam, anti-virus, etc purposes and then forwarded on to your normal and current mail server nothing to change, and all of your email will be archived and avalable to view at postini.
With 40 employees I don't think you will really get much ROI, by purchasing a server that has some hardware redundancy, Anti-Virus Email Softwrae, Operating System, Anti-Spam, and the monitoring and administration that it will take to patch and harden and maintain the email server. you also stated that you are running off of broadband, if you connection goes down, generarlly so will your email server.
The Postini Solution requires your ISP to perform some configuration changes to first have the email sent to them for archiving, spam, anti-virus, etc purposes and then forwarded on to your normal and current mail server nothing to change, and all of your email will be archived and avalable to view at postini.
Yes, I would also suggest that you don't want your own mail server. Email is important enough and you are only asking for frequent downtime if you try to run it without competent local IT support.
Use one of the alternate suggestion already posted above.
Use one of the alternate suggestion already posted above.
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You may need to let your staff know that their email is being monitored. What extent is it being monitored for? Can staff be sacked/disciplined for email inappropiate material?
As far as hosting your own mail server, it would be best if you limit the access to that box from the outside to just your mail provider (for example if you use SMTP then limit port 25 to your mail providers IP address.