I'm getting a dedicated Win2000 from ECUI.COM in a couple of weeks and I have a valid licence for Microsoft Exchange Server 2000 with me.

I'm gonna be hosting between 10-20 Domains with maybe 150-200 users on this server and I was wondering if exchage is a good choice or an overkill for an email server?

Thanks
Abbas

Unless you need the collaborative & scheduling feature, it is way to much overkill.

But, then you already have the license so why not use it? :)

It is my experience that with Exchange, you pretty much need to have a firewall. Makes it a bad candidate for co-location.

Hard to secure, as it requires open all those ports that you are supposed to close with Win2000 servers.

Abbas,
I'm probably wrong but, to host 200 sites on a win2000 server, you'll probably need around 1 gig of ram.. since the basic already requires 256 ram.

I wouldn't host paid users on a win2000 server, but I would host 1-2 websites on it..

win2000 is actually a stable product :)

Umm..ADW: There will only be 15-20 sites on the server. The 150-200 is the number of users that will require email accounts

:)

So I have the option of iMail vs. Exchange. Can I get an opinion guys?

Thanks
-Abbas

When we started out doing hosting, we came across many decisions on how to do the mail for all of our domains...

It was pretty clear to us in the beginning not to use Exchange.. not only because of its outrageous costs, but because it pretty much over kill..

If you need something to just do email for you, try something else.. From our experience, IMAIL sucks..

But there is a company which makes mochamail.com, they have a very nice mail package.. i think the company's name is Rock Ridge..
The one that we use currently for an excess of 5000 domains is Qmail...

Along with Inter7.com's QmailAdmin and SQWebMail package, it gives you easy adminstration to add and modify domains, and for the client it provides a control panel to edit emails, forwards, etc.. The nicest thing is the webmail..

take a look at it at http://www.inter7.com

Whats wrong with IMAIL.. Never really had a problem with it YET.. Why was it that you did not like it maybe i am missing some thing..:D