I pre-apologize if this has been asked a-plenty before. I'm not an "IT-guy" but know more than anyone in the office so it falls into my lap and I learn as I go along. We have a small office with 10 employees, slowly growing to perhaps 15 in a few years' time. We're upgrading from SBS 2003 to 2008 or 2011 (I figure we should go with 2011, right?) and our IT consultants recommend taking Exchange in-house, bypassing our external mail host. We are presently not using the Exchange features to their fullest potential as we're setup so that each desktop/laptop downloads email directly, with Exchange syncing/backing up only when we're in the office: Internet - Mail Host - Client - Exchange. The IT consultant suggestion is Internet - Exchange - Client. However, to avoid loss of email during prolonged powerouts, they are adamant that we use their "hold service" of sorts, which will receive our mail before Exchange, do spam/AV checks and hold it if our Exchange for some reason is down. Of course this is at a per address per month cost. Not a ghastly amount but presently around $150 a year. I'm wondering if a better solution would be to keep the external mail host and set it up Internet - Mail Host - Exchange - Client. This way the "hold" is free (as we have a webpage so the hosting account can't be cut anyway). Guess there would be a slight delay with mail handling as Exchange will have to be configured to send/receive every minute or so, as opposed to immediate (?) without the Mail Host, Exchange only. I'm also generally not a big fan of hooking up directly to the one and only in-house server when out of the office, as it hosts all our biz applications and has access to all company data. I don't trust the safety in public or hotel WiFis when at trade shows, on vacation and such. Any comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I would suggest using your SBS 2011 to its full potential, that is to say point your MX-record to your public IP and then use some sort of port forwarding to point the mailflow to the internal IP of the SBS2011. This way you maximize your investment in SBS2011, ROI. Sure, a power outage is a threat, but you could ease the impact by adding an UPS, Uninterruptible Power Supply to protect from shorter outages and gracefully shut down services if the break is longer than the battery life of the UPS. You have a multitude of connection options to your Exchange mailbox in SBS2011, over Internet by browsing through a web page, full Outlook connectivity without VPN (Outlook Anywhere), and pushed out to your mobile phone. All connections are secured over encrypted channels. If it were me I'd absolutely go for SBS2011 solution with full implementation of Exchange 2011.Jesper Bernle | Blog: http://xchangeserver.wordpress.com

What do you call extended power outages? Most remote email services will attempt to resend email for up to 48 hours, and if you haven't got power back in that time window then you have bigger problems to worry about. You would also have had enough time to put something else in place for email delivery. The biggest problem with having another system between email delivery and your server is that you lose the biggest filtering measure, and that is recipient validation. I have clients who drop 60% or more of all email traffic because it is sent to non-valid recipients. If you aren't the primary receiving server then you have to accept all of that email and then drop it, which is a waste of bandwidth. With regards to remote access, that comes down to managing the risk. If you are a VPN then that will give you secure access to the internal network. For straight email access to the server an SSL certificate will allow all of the traffic to be secure using Outlook Anywhere. This will be more secure than collecting email from an ISPs server, which is unlikely to be secure, so will be going across in the clear both sending and receiving. Simon.Simon Butler, Exchange MVP Blog | Exchange Resources | In the UK? Hire Me.

Thanks guys, so I guess taking mail handling fully in-house is a good idea. We have a UPS so we're covered there. Recipient validation is something I'll have to read up on. We don't have a catch-all address which receives also non-valid addressed email, so dunno if we'll drop a lot in traffic. There's the usual spam, of course, to valid addresses fished from webpages, tradeshow registrys and such. I did read that there could arise problems with reverse lookup, if our IP mistakenly is classified as a spammer. Any comments on that? / Jay

Lack of PTR on the IP address will get your email blocked by a number of sites. Therefore you either need to have a static IP address and ask the ISP to set the PTR or you need to use your ISP's SMTP server (or another service) as a smart host for outbound email. It can be surprising how much email is dropped to non-valid recipients. On my home system I drop about 50% to non-valid recipients, I have clients where it is as high as 70%. That isn't ex-staff, but complete nonsense email addresses. I have one client who statistically 100% of their email is spam. They get so much that their legitimate email is a rounding error. http://blog.sembee.co.uk/post/Truly-Spectacular-Results-from-Vamsoft-ORF.aspx Simon. Simon Butler, Exchange MVP Blog | Exchange Resources | In the UK? Hire Me.