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Ask HN: How do we replace our POP3 email solution?

10 points| krustchinsky | 9 years ago | reply

We are a medium size company and our aging POP3 solution is becoming difficult to manage. It's a shared hosting setup that has to be administered via CPanel, what are our options? Any recommendations on how to tackle the monster that is mail?

14 comments

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[+] zeveb|9 years ago|reply
Ars Technica had an article about running your own mailserver, to include IMAP, awhile back (http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/how-to... while it's targeted at the individual user, a lot of the steps would apply to a larger, multi-server organisation. You could extend postfix with a PostgreSQL database, split the different servers onto different hosts &c.

Honestly, these days it's probably easier and cheaper to just buy Google Apps or Office365, but if you want to control your own destiny it's really not difficult.

[+] kim0|9 years ago|reply
Options include:

  - Migrate mails over to SaaS (Gmail, Amazon mail, or Exchange online) .. Probably the best option, unless you want to run your own
  - Run a "full featured" open-source mail service like Zimbra on servers on any cloud of your choosing!
  - Run a simpler old-school mail solution, like postfix + https://roundcube.net/ for better access
Actually if you need help doing this migration, I'd be happy to help (I'm mostly an Ops person)
[+] tapiwa|9 years ago|reply
With email, you want simple, turnkey, and ideally self service.

Free::

http://modoboa.org/en/

http://www.iredmail.org/ ... also has paid version

Paid::

http://www.afterlogic.com/mailsuite/linux-email-server

https://www.atmail.com/

With each of the options above, you get the complete stack.

::Email server (IMAP + SMTP + POP3)

::Spam protection etc

::Web Client.

And for each of them, you also get a decent web admin panel out of the box.

Trust me, you really don't want to be spending the next week putting the individual components together and getting them to play nice yourself.

[+] creshal|9 years ago|reply
• Cyrus – it's used by Fastmail and others, and with its perl API somewhat manageable. We e.g. put all configuration in Active Directory and sync it over with said API. It also has reasonable clustering and replication support.

• Google Apps.

[+] kim0|9 years ago|reply
I'm new to HN posting .. How do I create those bullets :) cheers
[+] Spooky23|9 years ago|reply
Do you have more than 20,000 people? Special security requirements?

If no, move to Google or Microsoft.

[+] ryanlm|9 years ago|reply
Why host it yourself? Outsource this.
[+] brianjking|9 years ago|reply
You should be able to at least add IMAP instead of POP3, no?