email server vs. hosted

should we take it in house or not?

[mattb]

We currently have our website and email hosted by the same provider. Our End Users have Eudora on their desktops and pull the mail right off the offsite hosted server via our dedicated (384k) connection. For the most part it works fine. However, we do have a few issues. The number of viruses / spam we have been getting grows in number every month. We currently have no way to filter the mail on our hosts server. We are also limited to a 5mb mail message. We are looking at either: A. Hosting the mail part of our site from another provider. (Need a full feature set of email tools, such as virus protection, filtering, forwarding, etc. Ability to run Perl scripts.)
B. Hosting in house.

Potentially, we might write some type of CRM module that would keep track of customer email conversations with our sales agents.

Any thoughts / ideas?

Thanks,

Matt

[NFFC]

>Any thoughts

I would keep well away from B, managing email servers must be one of the most time consuming tasks there is. I would look for a provider which offers what you want, move the site if need be.

[IanTurner]

There are a number of possiblities:

If you have few users then hosting externall is probably the way to go, you will spend time maintaining your mail server and spam blocking.

You could also go for a private SMTP feed or ETRN relay to an internal mail server, whereby your hosting company hosts the mail IP address and routes mail for your domain, they should be able to block mail from certain domains and do your basic spam filtering. You can then do more SPAM filtering at your own internal mail server.

Or you could set your DNS route mail to an in house mail server. If you are on a dedicated 384k connection I expect that you have most of the basic protections in place firewalls anti-virus etc. Good mail server software is not that difficult to configure these days. The only thing that you must at all costs avoid is open relaying.

If it was me I would go for the following dependent on number of mail accounts.

<20 external hosting

20-100 SMTP feed or ETRN

100+ Run your own mail server

[seofan]

We currently have no way to filter the mail on our hosts server.

An "around the elbow" approach would be to use MailWasher (shareware - free but requested donation is with the software). You can administer the server with MailWasher and delete spam from the server without downloading to an email client. Like I said, an around the elbow approach.