Hi everyone, This is probably a relatively simple thing to do for most administrators, but I'm new to the game and looking for some pointers, or even better a damned walk through that explains this to a newbie like me. =) We've currently got our emails provided by "rackspace" ugh! and I have a nice big exchange server, with windows 2012 r2 on it. Simply put how do I get my email system to be the new server we have, and eliminate the Rackspace service provider... domains are registered elsewhere. I keep seeing walk throughs for "internal Windows SMTP Service to relay email", but is this right, as it's saying "internal", and if it is right how do I connect this up to use the domain name I have? And then I guess, manage it? Any help is always appreciated, I have googled a lot about this, and asked on IRC (got no reply, because I think everyone just looked and laughed at my question). Regards, Sycrid
Logon to your domain name cpanel and amend your mx record to point to your external ip address. If you have an ISA or TMG server or any other type of firewall you can configure to forward traffic to port 25 to your mail server. Amending your mx record and applying can take a few hours to propagate. You will obviously have to install Exchange on your server and set up mailboxes. If you are planning on using a third party mail filtering provider you will need to configure your send receive connectors so traffic flows through the external mail filtering provider for spam scanning. Is this what you are after or did I ready your question incorrectly?
Hi GKD_UK, (name indicating you're from the UK?) That's really helpful mate, I'm assuming I set up the exchange server with the internal Smtp function, and then it just listens to port 25, anything that comes through on it, just matches up with any accounts we have. Would that be right? Install Exchange (is this the OS... windows exchange 2012 r2) or is it some thiing else? What do I set up the mailboxes in? On the original domain name hosting? Or inside of the exchange server, running through the smtp part of it? Thanks for the help so far.
Exchange is a big and complicated beast, much more complicated that any other mailserver system I've used. It might have lots of great features and clients do love it's ease of use, but it's a royal pain in the butt setting it up and maintaining it from a providers perspective. If you're planning a standalone version then make sure it's installed on something like a VPS so that you can take copies of your working system and be able to restore it easily in the event of a problem - the last thing you want to be doing is trying to rebuild a whole server, with Exchange on top, and restore all your information, when it is time sensitive. You'll also need a excellent backup system that allows restore of individual mailboxes as well as the whole VPS. Make sure regular versions are stored and keep them for several days as a minimum. If you're planning to offer Exchange 2013 as a service to clients, or it will become a critical service for yourself, then forget about standalone, you will need a clustered solution or else you are on a hiding-to-nothing. When we set-up an Exchange cluster we never have less than 6 clustered servers dedicated to running that email service (2xDomain Controllers, 3xCAS/MBX Servers, 1xFile Share Witness Server) but often have a lot more for greater redundancy and separation of CAS and MBX roles. Each server you add is another operating system licensing cost on top of the licensing costs for each email account you set up. The good thing is, Exchange 2013 has excellent clustering capabilities with automatic recovery to other servers in a cluster if a mailbox server goes down, but you pay for that safety with more complicated set-ups and relatively high costs. You'll find some excellent advice and articles at - http://exchangeserverpro.com/ Exchange 2013 is generally easy to manage via its web management interface, but if anything goes wrong it can be a nightmare to fix or find the problem. If you don't have the experience to set it up and trouble-shoot it yourself, make sure you have someone available 24/7 who has Exchange experience (you'll need them - beleive me) and expect to pay BIG bucks for their time. Why am I saying that rather than answer your question directly? I've a feeling your in way over your head here. I don't mean it in a bad way, but Exchange is not something for the inexperienced to take on. Even our company, with it's years of hosting experience, running Exchange in our offices, and running email servers for our clients, partnered up with another company when we first started contemplating offering Exchange services to our clients so we could make sure we had experienced Exchange support techs on-hand for set-up and maintenance when required. Even now, when we run the operations ourselves, we still have a support company on retainer for 24/7 Exchange support if we ever need it for the more esoteric problems with crop up from time-to-time. Exchange is not something to take on lightly if the service is critical to you, and it's definitely not something you should do without a decent amount of experience if you have paying clients. Email is probably the most important service you can provide for your clients - especially business clients - so you can't afford to mess around with dodgy set-ups, inexperience, no failovers, no backup, and no way to make a VVVVV speedy recovery if something goes wrong. If you don't really need Exchange, but do need a good email service, then other email servers such as Smartermail are excellent systems with similar functionality to Exchange but much easer to set-up and manage - and much cheaper too.