HN Explorer

Ask HN: How to manage web mail for multiple clients?

1 points by jfaucett ↗ HN
My current task requires that I somehow figure out how to manage email for a varying 10-15 total clients who all need their own email addresses. I'm a total newb in mail servers and so I would really appreciate the HN expertise on this one, I really don't want to have to configure a mail server on each virtual machine for each client, surely there's a better way. Thanks in advance!

- I would gladly outsource. All the clients have separate domain names on different servers. i.e. one client is client1.com at 12.1.45.6 on one server, the other client2.com on 199.15.16.16 on another server.

2 comments

[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 25.9 ms ] thread
puredevotion
Google Apps? Windows Live? Could you be more specific? All users are in the same organization (same domain) or do they want seperate domains/servers? Can it be outsourced or do you want to host all servers/services yourself?
sixtofour
They'll have to point their MX records at you if you run your own in and out servers, or at Google Apps or Fastmail or similar if you outsource.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MX_record

Buy yourself a play domain, get a new gmail account, and set things up so that you appear to be your play domain while you use gmail. Then decide.

If you don't outsource, you probably don't need a server on each VM, but I suppose that depends in part on your contracts. But think about it, I use my own domain at gmail and Google doesn't maintain a mail server just for me.