Small Business - You've got mail!

Most offices have email of some sort set up on their internal network, and increasingly they have a connection to the Internet. In many cases, however, the two aren't linked. Whatever the internal email system you use, and whatever type of net connection, linking the two together to provide an external email connection via the Internet can be tricky; but a little planning and forethought will make it a simpler and more manageable task. Manageability in particular can be an important issue, especially for a smaller company, where looking after the email is likely to be delegated to someone who might be the network administrator as well as having a full-time role in another department.

Before you look at ways to connect your existing internal email system to the rest of the world, you need to decide if it suits your needs. Does the internal system have quirks and annoying features? Does it regularly fall over and require a lot of administrator attention? If so, this might be a good opportunity to replace it.

If you're using simple workgroup email on Windows PCs, would you benefit from a more sophisticated solution, like Novell GroupWise, which will help manage workflow of documents between users? Or would the central database approach of Lotus Notes make it easier for people in your organisation to access the information they need?

Whatever the decision, now is the time to make it; adding an Internet email link can be, though not necessarily, an expensive thing to do. Buying software that will have to be replaced if you change your mail system will only make things more so.

If you're happy with your internal mail system, a straightforward solution for many people is to simply add on an email 'gateway' service, which will act as a bridge for emails to and from the outside world. But while a gateway will work, it might not be the best choice. The type of gateway software and hardware available will depend on the setup you have already, and the software certainly is unlikely to be easy to move between different hardware systems.

Hardware and software options

While your existing internal email solution may just be implemented in software - perhaps with a shared 'post office' set of directories on a common hard disk - when it comes to linking this to the Internet, you will need a more sophisticated setup. Firstly, if your internal email package doesn't run on a server, it has to rely on individual email programs to place files in appropriate places. With an Internet connection, however, you must have a package that runs on a server, collecting messages and distributing them to users. The package might also have to convert email from an Internet format to the format used by your internal mail package, so that attachments appear correctly in messages, extra Internet headers are hidden, and so on.

In a small network, or one with excess computing power on some of the PCs, you can very probably run an Internet email service on one of your existing computers. But if your hardware is creaking at the seams, or you want to choose a particular type of software, you might find that the only way to run things reliably is to have another computer dedicated to processing messages. And if you expect that Internet email is going to be important to your business, that's almost certainly a necessity.

Basic connections

At its very simplest, you may be able to get away without spending any money at all on your Internet mail link. If you're using a program like Outlook, or the Windows Messaging Client (called Exchange in earlier versions of Windows 95), you can easily add the Microsoft Internet Mail service to a user's profile, which will allow external mail to be sent and received.

If you have an Internet connection that's accessible to all the systems, either via a network and a router, or perhaps using the new connection sharing in Windows 98 Second Edition, then all you need to do is find an Internet service provider that will allow you to collect individual emails from a single POP 3 account.

For example, Demon Internet's POP 3 service allows you unlimited email users, and you can retrieve just the messages for a single user in a session by specifying a user name as well as your hostname when you connect. A few simple configuration options on each computer, and hey presto! - individual Internet emails on the desktop, with each person still using the same mail program they were used to.

There are drawbacks to this approach, however. If you're relying on an external ISP, then it's unlikely you'll be able to have multiple users simultaneously accessing the mailbox; and the more users in your office, the greater the likelihood of that happening. And, of course, the main sticking point may be ensuring that each machine has access to the Internet via a shared modem or other connection; adding a router to enable all the systems access could cost anything from £400 to a couple of thousand pounds.

Nevertheless, with a simple router or Windows 98 connection sharing, this can be one of the most cost-effective ways of linking to the rest of the world. For a small office, with little technical expertise, it could also be the simplest and most trouble-free solution: once the email clients have been configured, there's little else to do.

Mid-range system

As we've said, when you have more than a handful of users, things start to become more complicated. Not only will there be potential problems of connection - more than one person wanting to access a common ISP mailbox at the same time - but there are management issues too. While a small company might be able to work on the basis of people knowing who to contact for each job, things are less clear in a larger company with more staff. So a larger company will need a selection of addresses to contact whole teams as well as individuals, for example the sales team or the accounts department, without knowing personal addresses. And the more addresses there are, the greater the likelihood of people wanting a central contact point where they can ask who to mail about a particular issue.

Having a 'postmaster' address is mandatory; it's part of the Internet's mail standards, and as a result, it's where many people will send complaints and general queries. And it highlights one of the features that you'll almost certainly need when your mail system grows: aliasing.

Aliases are vital if you want to manage mail effectively. They give you control over your own email server, allowing you to add people, like new members of the accounts department, without having to contact your ISP each time a change is needed.

At this point you'll have to make hard decisions about how you want to connect your mail system, and how much you want to spend on it. Do you want to register an Internet domain name for your organisation? And how will you collect your messages? Via an Internet connection, or some other type of dial-up link?

You might have thought that 'Internet email' means you have to use TCP/IP.

But you don't need to run the TCP/IP protocol to collect your messages.

While this is an obvious option, many people feel that using the protocol can present a security risk too: as long as the TCP/IP connection lasts, your network is potentially vulnerable to malicious attacks.

You can collect messages in other ways instead, like UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy Program) or via a connection to a specialised service provider that runs a gateway service for you. This will stop people from directly attacking systems on your network, although viruses in email attachments, such as Melissa, will still reach you.

So what's the main benefit to other types of connection? In many ways, it's simplicity. Installing and configuring TCP/IP, as anyone who's ever set up a network of computers knows, isn't always the most straightforward task, so for less technical administrators, using an alternative system can save a lot of time.

Tight budgets, small hardware

The amount you have available to spend can affect your choice of hardware and software.

If you want to run a package like Microsoft Exchange, you'll need a well-featured PC running Windows NT Server, with plenty of memory and disk space. That could set you back over £2000, while NT Server 4 will cost you over £600. You can put Exchange Server on your fileserver, but it will be excruciatingly slow if there's more than a handful of users. For all but the very smallest offices, you'll need a dedicated computer.

For tight budgets, or organisations with limited technical resources, there are 'Internet in a box' solutions, essentially a small computer running an email server and web proxy in a box that comes ready configured.

Just plug it in, add a POP 3 mailbox facility to your existing email clients, and you're ready to go.

With more technical expertise you can achieve the same yourself, running either a Windows-based POP3 server - many of which can be downloaded from the Internet - or using Linux or Unix to do the same job. With a dedicated system such as the Cobalt Qube (pictured, above left), much of the configuration of a Unix email server can be done from a web browser, without the need to know any Unix commands.

Dedicated servers

While many of the well-known commercial email packages have their own Internet gateway software either available as an option or included in the basic bundle, they're not the only solutions - and very often not the cheapest. For sheer ease of use, a package that's properly integrated with your internal mail system will usually be the best option and the least trouble to maintain. Bear in mind, though, that if you use a client like Outlook, there's no reason why you shouldn't just use it as an Internet mail system, rather than searching for ways to link your internal system to the world.

If you do want to look around more, as long as your mail system uses one of the common standards, such as MAPI, then you'll be able to find a selection of gateway programs that will link it to other networks, including the Internet. For example, the TFS gateway software supports several different email systems, and will connect to a service provider via UUCP rather than TCP/IP; it will also run on a fairly low-powered PC, albeit quite slowly.

In looking at different solutions, there are more things to consider besides compatibility - and it can sometimes be these that will determine which is the best package to use. How, for example, does the gateway handle email addresses? Will it provide 'fuzzy matching' and guess that if someone mails over the Internet to 'nwhitfield' that a message should be delivered to 'Nigel Whitfield' on the internal mail system? Or will it just bounce back an error to the sender?

How easily can aliases be created? And will the system automatically recognise a new user you add to the internal mail system for external mail? Or will you have to add 'set up external mail' to the list of things to do each time you have a new user? Both have their advantages, but if it's ease of use you want, a system that does everything for you, and minimises the amount of misdirected email, will make life much simpler.

Security

All of these are factors to consider when you're choosing your mail system, but there's one that may influence people more than any other now - security.

No matter how your PCs connect to the rest of the world for email, whether it's via a dialup link to an ISP's POP3 server, a Unix-based gateway on your LAN, or a UUCP connection to a gateway that links to your Microsoft Mail system, you're still vulnerable to viruses and other malicious attacks that can be sent as email attachments. So for anyone who takes the integrity of their systems seriously, there's one important question that needs to be asked of just about any mail system: Can it be protected against viruses?

The answer is no. With the speed of development of viruses, you're unlikely to be able to offer complete protection - and some speculate that it's the false feeling of safety that caused so many people to fall prey to the latest round, after installing anti-virus software on their email gateways.

Even so, it's worth finding an email gateway that can be linked to anti-virus software; most of the major packages can do it, and it will provide some peace of mind. But it's never going to solve the problem. The only way to do that is to make sure the people who are using your email service are properly educated about the possible dangers of attachments. Just say no to executables, Word documents, and anything else that could carry a macro.

If you already have an anti-virus policy, check with the maker of the software you're using to see what email systems it can link to. And if you don't have one already, find out what's supported by the email software you want to use.

If you're using a server that talks TCP/IP to the rest of the world, then time spent making sure it's secure is vital; running Microsoft Exchange might seem a simple option, but if your NT server is linked to the rest of the world, even for just a few minutes a day, making sure you have the latest updates to applications like Internet Information Server is essential.

Unix systems too are vulnerable, but they seem to fall prey to attacks far less than the more standardised NT and Windows systems. Don't assume, however, that Unix or Linux will solve your problems in this regard: even if an email virus or worm won't affect the mail server itself, it could still pass unscathed to the PCs on your network.

All this might sound like a nightmare - and if you make the wrong decision, it can be.

But as our walk-through shows (over), it can also be pretty straightforward to configure a basic system to distribute email around your office and to the Internet.

SETTING UP INTERNET MAIL STEP BY STEP

NTMail is one of the most popular Internet mail systems for Windows NT. It will collect messages via a dialup account as well as a fixed link, and provides features such as aliasing and automatic response 'robots', and plug-ins that can perform functions such as virus checking. You can download a 28-day evaluation version from www.ntmail.co.uk.

Although this workshop is based around NTMail, the steps you'll need to set up TCP/IP addresses and email clients will be similar if you want to share a net connection via Windows 98 or a router that hides your network from the rest of the world.

1. If you're running NTMail or another system that provides a POP3 mail service, you'll need to use a POP3 or IMAP4 mail client on each PC - which means installing TCP/IP on all the systems on your network. For a small network with no permanent Internet link, configure the machines with sequential IP addresses from one of the private ranges (see PCW, September 1999, p110).

2. Put a hosts file in the Windows directory on each system to allow them to resolve names to addresses. Fig 1 is a sample file, created in Notepad and saved as HOSTS with no extension. If you simply want access to the email server, just list that in the file and none of the other systems.

3. On the client PCs, using a mail program like Outlook Express, you'll need to configure the name or IP address of the NTMail server for both sending and receiving email. We've called the server simply 'mail' and assigned it the IP address 192.168.1.1. If you're using a service like Demon's POP3, you could specify a particular email name by giving the account name user+hostname.demon.co.uk in Outlook, to collect messages just for 'user'. (Fig 2)

4. If you're using a Dial-Up Internet connection, now's the time to configure it. You'll also need to know the details of your account with the ISP that you're using, including the server that you can send all your outgoing email to. This means you can send mail out, then hang up the phone much more quickly.

5. Start the NTMail installation program. After being asked to agree to the licence, and for a postmaster's password, you'll see this splash screen, where you need to enter the IP address you assigned to your computer's network connection - 192.168.1.1 if you followed our example above. You also have to enter your domain name. Check the box if you're using a dial-up connection to the net. (Fig 3)

6. Now you have to enter the details of your ISP account. Click on Next, then you can specify how often to check for email if you're using a dial-up link. You can also specify whether to use POP3 or SMTP to collect email. POP3 is more common, but SMTP is used by some providers such as Demon and offered by others on request. SMTP is a better option, as it requires less configuration when you add other users. It's also on this page that you'll enter the name of your ISP's outgoing mail server. If you specified POP for collecting mail from the ISP, the next screen will prompt you for details.

7. Now all the other administration of NTMail can be done via a web browser from any PC, just by pointing it at port 8001 on the server. You'll need to enter the user name postmaster and the appropriate password.

8. From the main screen, click on the Users button and then choose Add.

You can add users one at a time, or type a list into the Add Many Users box, separating user name, password and real name by commas, as in our example screen. (Fig 4)

- There are plenty more configuration options in NTMail, allowing people to access their messages via the web, or enabling automatic responses. But for basic email between your network and the rest of the world, that's all there is to it.