exchange

We now offer Microsoft Outlook / Exchange as a hosted service, from just £9 + VAT per mailbox per month.

The advantages of this Exchange hosting service include:-

  • All hardware, software, IT management included
  • Free Outlook 2007 or Entourage for Mac 
  • Enterprise-grade infrastructure & Expert Microsoft Gold certified support – 24x7. Your Email is always safe and fully backed up.
  • Up to 4 GB space per mailbox (fully-aggregated)
  • Free Microsoft SharePoint for document storage
  • Free premium antivirus and antispam defense
  • Full Blackberry integration (as an extra service)
  • Accessible from anywhere nature via Outlook or Outlook Web Access

As well as professional email, hosted Exchange gives you shared calendars, task lists, contacts and files, with no management from yourself – we set it up and manage it for you.

To learn more about getting full-featured professional email for a low monthly fee, with no start-up costs, please call us at 0845 450 1254

How to set up a Blackberry with Exchange (without using Blackberry Enterprise server)

Most individuals that use their Blackberry in a small businesses environment would not buy Blackberry Enterprise Server for Exchange as it is simply too expensive and quite pointless for one or two users. Here is one method to bypass this and use the (UK) mobile phone providers Blackberry infrastructure and run it in conjunction with your Exchange system.

Since this article was written, IMAP and Outlook Web Access (OWA) have been made available via the Blackberry web gateway for a lot of providers. However mileage with these services vary and so there are sometimes reasons for reproducing the setup below. I'll also mention here that runPCrun can provide managed Microsoft Exchange hosting with full over the air Blackberry synchronisation from £12 p/mailbox with, call us if you are interested in this.

It's main advantages over just setting up standard POP3 collection are immediate (push) delivery of messages (rather that waiting for the Blackberry service to poll the POP3 provider) and also items sent via your Blackberry are kept in your Sent Items in Outlook/Exchange. This is attained with a little bit of tweaking and performs very well, although (obviously) the calendar,notes and tasks are not synchronised over the Internet as with the full blown server. In a small company this is not an issue and the synchronisation can occur easily using the cradle.

What this method does in a nutshell is when an email is received, it is forwarded immediately to the blackberry address. When a new mail or reply is sent from the Blackberry, it is sent masquerading as the Exchange email, and a copy is BCC'ed to the Exchange email address. This email is the sorted into the Sent Items folder using a server side rule.

The steps to attain this are thus:-

Slow Shutdown of Exchange 2003 installed on a DC

Small businesses sometimes have to run Exchange 2003 on a single Windows 2003 server which is also running as a DC. There is a slow shutdown problem which Daniel Petri solves with his page containing Method #2: Manually stop Exchange related services. Note: This behaviour has been solved by Exchange 2003 SP2.

Removing the 16Gb limit in Exchange 2003

Our company supports a number of Exchange servers for our clients and up until recently one of the bug bears we had was the hard encoded 16Gb database limit.

This meant that as soon as the combined total of the users email hit 16Gb, Exchange would shut itself down. There is a way to temporary increase this limit to 17Gb to allow you to delete emails and run the defrag utility to free up dead space but as soon as the server has been rebooted it's not long until it hits 16Gb and the problem returned.

Since these days 16Gb is not a massive amount of data, users send and work with large attachments in some of the industries we deal with and it started to become an issue. However, Microsoft in a rare moment of actually listening to its customers decided to increase this limit to something with a little more headroom.

Hence, from Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2 you can set the limit to up to 75Gb. Microsoft decided that having a simple tab in Exchange System Manager to set this limit would be too easy, you have to set it via a registry hack.

Once you install Service Pack 2, the limit is set at 18Gb and you have to choose a new limit depending on storage space you have.

The Keys that need to be changed are for the Private mailboxes:-

AOL Email test relays

Sending email to AOL customers can be a tricky business. Especially if you are say running your own mail server on an ISP connection like a lot of small businesses do, typically with Exchange on Windows 2003 Small Business Server.

AOL have given one minor tool to help you avoid the bouncebacks, (typically by changing your configuration so your email is sent through another SMTP 'smarthost' like an ISP's SMTP server)

Once you've made changes that you think are needed, you can test the outgoing IP by emailing to the AOL IP Confirmation email ipconfirm@mailtest.mx.aol.com

We offer full Exchange Mailbox hosting.

Exchange Hosting is a service that offer to our customers if they want to oursource their Exchange infrastructure.

This gives you the mailbox & support of a large organisation, but at a fraction of the price of setting up the equivalent mail server and the maintenance involved in keeping it working on a small scale for your own business.


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