Exchange Alternative on Linux - Money Saving Project

maximus0983

How much are you paying your current host? Total around £200 a year for all domains and emails
How many mailboxes/users do you need to support? Personally I have 5 email accounts for the office plus about 20 staff.
What volume of emails do you handle per day? Incoming emails amount to some 8000 - 10000 that we actually use for work + junk, flyers, etc
Do you just need email, or do you have a requirement for calender, notes, sharing, general collaboration etc? We would want a calendar and address book
What mail client do you use on the workstations? I have a mac and the others use outlook
Are you supporting a single domain, or multiple? we have a total of 5 domains that we use.

Edit: I don't think you've chosen the best distro to use as a server, and you'll probably be better off using Debian, Suse or Slackware. Ubuntu is aimed more at the dekstop audience, whereas Debian and Slackware are aimed towards server use. Although, Free/OpenBSD would probably be a much, much better choice but might be above your requirements.[/quote]

We are open to changing the build. Ive used a little bit of Ubuntu for personal testing, etc and it looks very nice. Ubuntu has a server edition. Wouldnt that be useful? Ive read about a couple of examples on the internet (http://flurdy.com/docs/postfix/) and they have also used ubuntu.

Will download the other two to check them out!

The main reason for this exercise is to find a safer and affordable way to keep our emails stored for the whole office.

S0litaire

Ubuntu Server edition is VERY stable (Amazon use it for their "Web Services" Product). you just have to pick what mail server and a way to get the calendar features to work
But you can do most of that using Google apps.

maximus0983

dont google apps charge for their service?

S0litaire

google apps service is free.

timbim_2

Not for businesses. It is reasonably pricey, but not nearly as expensive as an exchange server.