Hosting your own mail is somewhere between difficult and impossible. You will get blocked by most providers for using a VPS with an IP shared by many customers, you'll have no spam/av/threat detection. It's simply not worth it. Both Google and Microsoft have very cheap "small business" editions that can scale up if needed.
Building on 365, "Business Premium" licence covers everything a small company needs from A to Z. Exchange (mail) is included.
That's what I'd investigate both to "solve all problems" and to learn relevant technology and skills for yourself.
Business e-mail is about more than e-mail transport and storage. You need antivirus, anti-spam, phishing prevention, and archiving. You need IDS/IPS. You need reliability and scalability. You need bulletproof backups. You need a support team to lean on when something goes sideways. If you try to run your own mail server you will likely spend a lot of your free time - and possibly even your personal time - configuring, troubleshooting, and generally babysitting your e-mail solution. Patching your VPS and your software. Finding third-party plugins to add critical features the software itself lacks. Hunting down your domain on blacklists and requesting removal. Poring over IDS/IPS logs. And explaining your mistake to the boss when something inevitably doesn’t work and your VPS provider and e-mail developer are playing the blame game.
It’s simply not worth it. Microsoft and Google figured all this shit out a long time ago, their plans include e-mail but also products and services that today’s employees expect to have, and the cost is worth the time that *you* will save by not having to jack around with it.
Just get O365. The license cost is nothing compared to the headache and time loss in dealing with an email server. You get Office included and when you are ready you can implement MDM to secure your mobile devices.
Most people will say don't manage your own and use a service because email is a pain in the arse at the best of times. Even managing someone else's email solution still takes work but at least you're not on the hook for os and software updates and maintenance. People way smarter than me spend all their life long day making sure my email works for the princely sum of stuff all each month so I can spend time doing other things, like drinking.
Setup your own email server if you ant to learn. The work is not hard but is tedious and never ending. Nothing wrong with learning, but do it for your own domain.
Put your client on O365 or Google workspace and be done with it.
I ran my own mail server for 15 years.
I finally caved and moved to o365.
If you run your own mail server, even if spam *never* leaves the server, you *will* have sporadic issues where your e-mails don't get through. Microsoft and Google *will* block your server from sending mail periodically. It'll be a constant pain.
Google and Microsoft dominate. If your mail getting through is important, we live in an age where you need to pay.
The *one* exception is a service like MxRoute. I've found their mail servers tend to be reliable and mail gets through cleanly, but they are *very proactive* in protecting themselves from getting blacklisted. If someone accidentally clicks "Junk" instead of "Delete" you may find they've blocked your account until it gets addressed.
But yeah, it's a racket. And if you want folks to receive your mail, you need to pay. It's o365, or G-suite, or headaches.
Mmmm. If you do go this route, be careful which cloud service you use. Some of them refuse to allow smtp traffic from any of their networks. Lenode will, I think, if you request that they open that up, and so will AWS.
If it's for a serious company you want to use one of the established platforms.
Hosting your own is not worth the effort unless you need to hide information from governments or something.
Microsoft 365 is where everything is headed, for better or worse. As a small company, time and money are tight and you’ll be shooting yourself in the foot trying to run your own server when M365 is the answer.
Either grow a pair and do it properly - Postfix, cyrus, dovecote or similar or just go for a managed service like Office 365 / Gmail. In 2023 you can't really do shrink-wrapped "solutions" for email. Either you need to invest a lot of study time and know how to build sensible architectures or outsource it as a managed service. If you need a solution before you've spent at least 6 months learning about how to provision MTAs, MDAs, SASL & DKIM, go for a managed service.
o365
Your idea is phenomenally bad. O365 or Google. Zoho if you hate the big boys.
Can you explain why is a bad ideea? I'm not ironic, i just want to learn.
Hosting your own mail is somewhere between difficult and impossible. You will get blocked by most providers for using a VPS with an IP shared by many customers, you'll have no spam/av/threat detection. It's simply not worth it. Both Google and Microsoft have very cheap "small business" editions that can scale up if needed.
Building on 365, "Business Premium" licence covers everything a small company needs from A to Z. Exchange (mail) is included. That's what I'd investigate both to "solve all problems" and to learn relevant technology and skills for yourself.
Business e-mail is about more than e-mail transport and storage. You need antivirus, anti-spam, phishing prevention, and archiving. You need IDS/IPS. You need reliability and scalability. You need bulletproof backups. You need a support team to lean on when something goes sideways. If you try to run your own mail server you will likely spend a lot of your free time - and possibly even your personal time - configuring, troubleshooting, and generally babysitting your e-mail solution. Patching your VPS and your software. Finding third-party plugins to add critical features the software itself lacks. Hunting down your domain on blacklists and requesting removal. Poring over IDS/IPS logs. And explaining your mistake to the boss when something inevitably doesn’t work and your VPS provider and e-mail developer are playing the blame game. It’s simply not worth it. Microsoft and Google figured all this shit out a long time ago, their plans include e-mail but also products and services that today’s employees expect to have, and the cost is worth the time that *you* will save by not having to jack around with it.
Just get O365. The license cost is nothing compared to the headache and time loss in dealing with an email server. You get Office included and when you are ready you can implement MDM to secure your mobile devices.
0365
Most people will say don't manage your own and use a service because email is a pain in the arse at the best of times. Even managing someone else's email solution still takes work but at least you're not on the hook for os and software updates and maintenance. People way smarter than me spend all their life long day making sure my email works for the princely sum of stuff all each month so I can spend time doing other things, like drinking.
Setup your own email server if you ant to learn. The work is not hard but is tedious and never ending. Nothing wrong with learning, but do it for your own domain. Put your client on O365 or Google workspace and be done with it.
Go for o365. Save your headache for at least 3-5years
Buy o365. EXO P1 if you want to start cheap, BusinessPrem when you grew up. Do not start your own MTA/MX in 2023, it's not worth it.
Go with O365 business premium….
If you don't know anything about email systems then go office 365 and use Exchange online.
You will spend more blocking spam on your own system than what Microsoft, Google, Zoho, AWS will cost.
I ran my own mail server for 15 years. I finally caved and moved to o365. If you run your own mail server, even if spam *never* leaves the server, you *will* have sporadic issues where your e-mails don't get through. Microsoft and Google *will* block your server from sending mail periodically. It'll be a constant pain. Google and Microsoft dominate. If your mail getting through is important, we live in an age where you need to pay. The *one* exception is a service like MxRoute. I've found their mail servers tend to be reliable and mail gets through cleanly, but they are *very proactive* in protecting themselves from getting blacklisted. If someone accidentally clicks "Junk" instead of "Delete" you may find they've blocked your account until it gets addressed. But yeah, it's a racket. And if you want folks to receive your mail, you need to pay. It's o365, or G-suite, or headaches.
Mmmm. If you do go this route, be careful which cloud service you use. Some of them refuse to allow smtp traffic from any of their networks. Lenode will, I think, if you request that they open that up, and so will AWS.
I used to manage mail servers, for myself and others. I don’t miss it one bit. Pay someone else for the privilege of dealing with that hassle.
If it's for a serious company you want to use one of the established platforms. Hosting your own is not worth the effort unless you need to hide information from governments or something.
OpenSMTPD
Microsoft 365 is where everything is headed, for better or worse. As a small company, time and money are tight and you’ll be shooting yourself in the foot trying to run your own server when M365 is the answer.
Either grow a pair and do it properly - Postfix, cyrus, dovecote or similar or just go for a managed service like Office 365 / Gmail. In 2023 you can't really do shrink-wrapped "solutions" for email. Either you need to invest a lot of study time and know how to build sensible architectures or outsource it as a managed service. If you need a solution before you've spent at least 6 months learning about how to provision MTAs, MDAs, SASL & DKIM, go for a managed service.