Defending a Cheap Mail Server

[RoadClosed]

Ahh spam, unfortunately those trojans are easy to package a small SMTP server along with. That points back to HT and Phish's ideas. I have had excessive spamming from clients before and since I use exchange I have the luxury of locking down all SMTP traffic incoming and outgoing from client machines. Hmmm If you put a packet sniffer on the gateway and filter SMTP then eliminate your mail server address you can track down the worst of the infections by seeing who is sending or recieving smtp/pop outside your server. If you think trojans are afoot. Have fun.

[Spyrochaete]

Have you considered hosting POP3\SMTP in-house? Mailenable (www.mailenable.com) and Desknow (www.desknow.com) are great, inexpensive Windows mail servers that are easy to administer and directly support local antivirus (Desknow allows you to subscribe to automated antivirus as well). Both servers also have great web portals.

[yuris]

there are here great points.
HTRegz have a good solution, you can host your own email server, and Spyrochaete, gave you a software solution (desknow)
Its free, okey its not the best, sometimes crash, have backup solution but it doesn't work very well.

you can combine these 2 ideas.

First, you creat your own Email server, lets say with Desknow (very easy to setup).
You ask your ISP to relay the company email, to your private email. Then you install, lets say a good aplications... Interscan Virus Wall.
this is a product from Trend Micro, you can buy the packged where you have the Anti-virus and virus wall.

This what will happend, The Interscan Virus wall, will recive all of your email, and scan for trojans,virus,worms,i guess spyware to, and key words of your choise(for example...porn, xxx... this usualy attaches virus), and then will deliver to your local Email server, and then the Outlook Express Clients can recive the email,and the Trend micro anti-virus, will again check the email being recived by outlook express(this you must setup on the client) and all of them will be clean.

This is a very good and cheap solution, you just have to spend money for the anti-virus( be careful to chose the packged, check all the programs that comes with it) and for the Relay (i guess your ISP will charge very few).

[Spyrochaete]

I've run Desknow for 3 years - as a standalone POP/SMTP/Webmail solution and as a Webmail portal on top of an existing POP/SMTP server and I can say with great amazement that the program has never ever crashed (though there are only 8 email accounts on my server - hardly high load). The only real concern with Desknow is that it takes a big tax on RAM due to its dynamic HTML generator engine.

I can't say that it WON'T crash, but I can say that it DIDN'T.

[yuris]

I say that Desknow crash, because it happend to me several times, at the point that the database got corrupted.
but i have more that 20 accounts, and its a high traffic email server, theres alot of email going in and out.
its by far the worst solution, but they don't want to spend money, im trying Qmail but im still learning how to install and configure.

desknow its not a bad email server, but is not good for high traffic email servers with more than 20 accounts

[Palmers4]

Fact is that the increasing spam flood is about to question usefulness of emailing in general. There is an ongoing argument whether to fight Spam on the mail server or at the client level. While my company (about 5000 employees) has decided to fight spam and viruses at the server with deploying "Postini." I switched back to Spam Bully as it is much more accurate, has a better integration into my Outlook email client and last but not least does not block too many legitimate emails from my customers as "Postini" did. Spam Bully is a reliable tool which adapts to my individual needs - I don't want to miss it anymore.