freeware pop3 forwarding?

June 23, 2006 9:34 AM

Cheapest (free?) and best way to forward email from a dedicated Windows 2003 server?

We have a Win 2k3 server with Windows SMTP and POP3 services installed. We're trying to set it up so that we can redirect email, ie [e-mail] => [e-mail]. What's our best option?

posted by Edible Energy to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Where is myrealemail.com hosted?
posted by Good Brain at 9:52 AM on June 23, 2006

by myrealemail.com I mean just any email address. We want to be able to have our users set up an email address on our server which is forwarded to their personal email accounts.
posted by Edible Energy at 10:02 AM on June 23, 2006

The SMTP server that comes with Server 2003 is very, very simplistic. I'm pretty sure it can't do what you're asking. The way I see it, you have two options:

1) Exchange. If Windows SMTP/POP3 is enough for you, then Exchange will be like buying a nuclear reactor so you can fry eggs for breakfast. But if your company's willing to spend the money, go for it.

2) Unix. Scary if you've never left Windows, but it's as versatile as you want it to be.

My company has a mail server running OpenBSD. It handles our 200-ish person email load with no sweat, and it's only a 700mhz machine with 512mb RAM. That includes scanning with SpamAssassin.

You could have the Unix (ok, ok...or Linux) box handle the mail entirely by itself, if you want. This would be the easiest to set up, but a little tougher on maintenance, because every time a user is added or removed from the Windows domain, you'd have to do it to the mail server seperately. Or set up a script to automate it, which is very do-able, but slightly more complex.

(That kind of setup is what's called a "POP Toaster"...here's a guide to setting up a POP Toaster with Linux and Qmail, to give you an idea of what you're looking at.)

Or you could have it just trap-and-forward specific recipients, and pass the rest off to your Windows server. Maintenance is easy, because it only needs to know about the special cases, not about everybody. Initial setup is slightly more complex, but only slightly.
posted by CrayDrygu at 11:01 AM on June 23, 2006

Mercury?

I've only used it once, but it's free, fairly fully-featured (certainly allows forwarding), reasonably straightforward and had, last time I looked, a friendly and active user community.
posted by Busy Old Fool at 4:39 PM on June 23, 2006

thanks dude, worked out nicely. Though a little clunky in the interface, can't beat something that's cheap-as-free.
posted by Edible Energy at 12:35 PM on June 26, 2006