Blackfriars goes Mac mini for email
Over the weekend, we here at Blackfriars finally transitioned our email over to our RAID-powered Mac mini server from our hosted Earthlink service. Why would we want to run our own email service? Well, here are a few reasons:
Fortunately, Mac OS X Server makes running an email server pretty much a load and go operation. What wasn't easy was getting our email server addresses to resolve correctly both inside and outside our firewall (long story). And we still can't seem to get Verizon to properly reverse-lookup our static IP address to our domain name, but hey, it works, so I'm not complaining too much -- yet.
I was originally tempted to try doing this with an Ubuntu Linux server, but in the end decided my time was worth a lot more than the difference in price between the two systems. And while Mac OS X Server does have some rather annoying quirks (not the least of which is that its serial number copy protection doesn't play nicely with the built in firewall), once I have the system running, it just keeps humming along without a peep. We've had it running in various test configurations here for a couple months now, and the only time it has been down has been when I brought it down. You have to love that in a server.
Moving our blog and Web site over to the server will take a bit longer, but so far, our server experience is going well. And best of all, we can see the lights on the disks flash when email arrives. Try doing that with a hosted service.
- We got tired of "Mailbox full" rejections. A 10 Mbyte restriction on email inboxes is so 1990s. Earthlink, are you listening?
- We didn't like the fact that when we wanted to send an email message across the office, those messages had to pass through California.
- We wanted secure WebMail.
- We wanted unlimited mailboxes.
- We wanted to be able to have a consistent outgoing email server, regardless of whether we're in the office or traveling.
- When we're not getting mail, we wanted to be able to actually figure out if the problem is with us or with our email service. And with the number of Earthlink email outages we had been seeing, this was getting to be a real issue.
Fortunately, Mac OS X Server makes running an email server pretty much a load and go operation. What wasn't easy was getting our email server addresses to resolve correctly both inside and outside our firewall (long story). And we still can't seem to get Verizon to properly reverse-lookup our static IP address to our domain name, but hey, it works, so I'm not complaining too much -- yet.
I was originally tempted to try doing this with an Ubuntu Linux server, but in the end decided my time was worth a lot more than the difference in price between the two systems. And while Mac OS X Server does have some rather annoying quirks (not the least of which is that its serial number copy protection doesn't play nicely with the built in firewall), once I have the system running, it just keeps humming along without a peep. We've had it running in various test configurations here for a couple months now, and the only time it has been down has been when I brought it down. You have to love that in a server.
Moving our blog and Web site over to the server will take a bit longer, but so far, our server experience is going well. And best of all, we can see the lights on the disks flash when email arrives. Try doing that with a hosted service.
Technorati Tags: Blackfriars, Earthlink, email, Mac mini, Mac OS X Server, Small business, Ubuntu
posted by Carl Howe at
4:01 PM
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