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Internal email server

By bob ·
I have recently inherited a network with more than a few quirks - my predecessor built the entire setup whilst he was still learning so I'm trying to tidy thing up somewhat.

Our company email is all IMAP hosted by an external agency who also host our website etc so anybody with access to their mailbox password can get their email from any internet enabled machine (of which we have only 3).

I would like to set all the machines up to be able to send and receive email but would also like to be able to store the email locally. I know this defeats the object of IMAP but I am essentially looking for a system for collecting the email from the IMAP server for each mailbox, saving a copy locally and then distributing it to each user so they can collect it with an outlook client.

We are running a server 2003/XP client environment. The server is not connected to the internet and the MD would rather it remained that way.

My understanding of email and mail servers is fairly slim so any idiot-proof help would be appreciated.

Cheers

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With Outlook Client, you can part of what you seek

by robo_dev In reply to Internal email server

http://www.eggheadcafe.com/software/aspnet/32961048/imap-folders--local-copy.aspx

Outlook will save a local copy of IMAP messages in it's local database.

It's much more complex to do the 'email gathering' scenario you seek, as it would be more logical just to host your own Microsoft Exchange server versus gathering everybody's email and somehow replicating it to a local mail server.

Of course, the place you would need to store all this gathered email would have to be an email server, such as Exchange, so logically, just having your own server is what you need.

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Understood

by bob In reply to With Outlook Client, you ...

Thanks for the reply. I'm already saving the local copies using Outlook and I have been toying with the idea of setting up a mail server but would this not cause problems with the fact that the external agency hosts our email?

Am I correct in assuming that I would need to cancel the hosting service so that any email sent to our domain would be directed to the IP of our new mail server than that of the external company's server as it does currently?

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