Take Control of OS X Server by Charles Edge

Author:Charles Edge [Edge, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: TidBITS
Published: 2016-02-18T05:00:00+00:00

You can take the new account online and use it like any other instant messaging account in the Buddies window in Messages.

Mail Services

Despite the constant claims about how email is dead (to be replaced by Facebook, Twitter, instant messaging, or whatever), no communication medium is more important to most organizations than email. Even people who claim they don’t use email much get testy when they miss an important message or can’t log for a while. Email is important.

It’s also conceptually simple: the SMTP, IMAP, and POP protocols on which email relies have been around for decades, and there’s not much to maintaining the databases of users and messages. In OS X Server, enabling all the Unix apps that provide mail services under the hood is merely a matter of clicking an ON switch and twiddling a few checkboxes.

But there’s a huge catch: Email is an ecosystem in which no mail server can stand on its own, because it must be willing to accept messages from anywhere on the Internet and be capable of sending messages to anywhere. And due to spammers and other nogoodniks, every email server on the Internet is constantly being bombarded with spam, viruses, and malware, often sent by zombie computers marching in massive international botnets. And don’t get me started about dealing with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, having your server used to relay spam, or the massive blowback that happens when the address of one of your users is used as the return address for spam. As I said in an earlier chapter, email is a toxic hellstew, and I strongly recommend that you avoid running your own mail server. I don’t, not any more.

Here are my recommendations:

For an individual hoping to run a mail server for a family, OS X Server will work, but unless you have vast amounts of free time to tinker with settings and deal with spam, you’re better off signing up everyone in your family for individual email accounts with iCloud, Gmail, FastMail, or the like.

For a small business in need of mail services, the amount of time that you’ll spend (or pay a consultant to spend) on OS X Server makes it a poor investment. Instead, try something like Google Apps for Work, which costs $60 per user per year, or Microsoft’s Office 365 for Business, which starts at $60 per year but includes a full Microsoft Office subscription for $99 per year. In general, Office 365 is better if you need Exchange compatibility or have mostly Windows clients; otherwise they’re similar.

For an organization that must run its own mail server, look at Kerio Connect. It isn’t cheap, starting at $475 for five users for a year, but it is an industrial-strength mail server.

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