Discussion:
Emergency/temporary mail server
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Iain King
2013-05-30 11:58:30 UTC
Permalink
Our SBS 2011 server is currently down; work is under way to get it back up. Meanwhile, we are not receiving emails / or are able to send them. Does anyone have any recommendations for setting up a simple mail server to catch them while the server is down? My thought is I can just assign another PC to the server's IP address (thus all the port-forwards will go to the right place), then run some kind of open source mail server. Is this doable?

Iain
Dfishel
2013-05-30 16:38:55 UTC
Permalink
I worked at a company with very bad internet connection so we used Dyn's email receiving to work as a backup MX to our server. It was cheap and easy to setup.

http://dyn.com/email-receiving/
Iain King
2013-05-31 11:26:40 UTC
Permalink
Post by Iain King
Our SBS 2011 server is currently down; work is under way to get it back up. Meanwhile, we are not receiving emails / or are able to send them. Does anyone have any recommendations for setting up a simple mail server to catch them while the server is down? My thought is I can just assign another PC to the server's IP address (thus all the port-forwards will go to the right place), then run some kind of open source mail server. Is this doable?
Iain
Turned out to be totally doable, with the only hiccups being remembering to turn off the firewall on the new temporary server, and having to install IIS for web services.

Steps:

1) Got MailEnable, the basic version of which is free. Had to install IIS on the PC in question to allow for the webmail access.
2) Set up a mailbox for each core user (only half a dozen for our small company)
3) Editted the port forwarding in the router to point SMTP to the IP of the new temporary server. I switched SSL over too, but I don't think that was necessary.

After the crisis is resolved the next thing will be to move the emails from this temporary server into the exchange server. Not sure how I'm going to do that, but in the mean time this is working.

Iain
Charlie Russel-MVP
2013-06-13 22:45:20 UTC
Permalink
You might find something like Exhange Defender a worthwhile investment. Not
only does it do a pretty decent job of cutting down the level of SPAM that
reaches your users, but their Live Archive feature can be a life saver in a
situation like you just ran into. Once your server is back up, all your
backlogged mail comes in. This means your users won't have any gap in their
email histories.
--
Charlie.
http://blogs.msmvps.com/russel
Post by Iain King
Our SBS 2011 server is currently down; work is under way to get it back
up. Meanwhile, we are not receiving emails / or are able to send them.
Does anyone have any recommendations for setting up a simple mail server
to catch them while the server is down? My thought is I can just assign
another PC to the server's IP address (thus all the port-forwards will go
to the right place), then run some kind of open source mail server. Is
this doable?
Iain
Turned out to be totally doable, with the only hiccups being remembering to
turn off the firewall on the new temporary server, and having to install IIS
for web services.

Steps:

1) Got MailEnable, the basic version of which is free. Had to install IIS on
the PC in question to allow for the webmail access.
2) Set up a mailbox for each core user (only half a dozen for our small
company)
3) Editted the port forwarding in the router to point SMTP to the IP of the
new temporary server. I switched SSL over too, but I don't think that was
necessary.

After the crisis is resolved the next thing will be to move the emails from
this temporary server into the exchange server. Not sure how I'm going to
do that, but in the mean time this is working.

Iain
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