Hands on: home email servers

I've looked before at the free version of the popular MDaemon email server with a view to using it to collect and distribute messages on a home network.

All told, I found it to be a very solid solution, but was a little disappointed to find many of the features included in the full product disabled.

Among them was support for Imap access, where messages are kept on the server rather than being pulled down to the client mailbox using Pop3, the only protocol supported in MDaemon Free.

This omission could be a drawback for users wanting to access their mail from more than one PC, so I promised to take a look at another free email server, called hMailServer, which does have this option. Here’s how I got on.

About hMailServer
Developed in Sweden, hMailServer is a totally free, open-source, SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) mail server for Windows that can be obtained from www.hmailserver.com.

A number of different versions were available at the time I was testing, topped by a 5.0 release for use on almost any version of Windows including Vista and Windows 2008. However, v5 was still in beta at the time so I gave it a miss. Instead I downloaded the 4.4.3 release, the latest available production version for use on Windows 2000, XP or 2003.

The download was a little over 3.5MB and contained everything needed to set up and run a Windows mail server. That included an embedded MySQL database although you can, if you prefer, point hMailServer at an external database during installation, with support for Microsoft SQL Server (version 7 or later) and PostgreSQL (v8 or above) as well as MySQL (v4 or later).

I ran the install on a couple of machines: a desktop running Windows XP, and a Windows Home Server which, as most of you know, is based on Windows Server 2003. In both cases it installed in a couple of minutes and worked with no problems whatsoever, consuming around 20MB of disk space with two background services configured during the install ­ one for hMailServer itself and another for the MySQL component. These are set to start automatically with management via a Windows console also created during the install process.

Managing hMailServer
The management console can be run remotely ­ useful if hosting the hMailServer on Windows Home Server ­ and starts with a message prompting you to add a domain.

As with any email server, this is the hardest bit to get right; not the domain name itself, but making sure the name can be resolved by external email servers and users to the address of the machine hosting the hMailServer software. Some DNS and firewall changes will, typically, be required to enable this to happen and it was good to find some help on the hMailServer website explaining in detail what’s involved. Both for users with a fixed IP address and the majority assigned a variable address by their ISP.

The same documentation also explains what to do if your ISP blocks outgoing messages sent using port 25 to SMTP mail servers other than its own. This is surprisingly common. My ISP (O2), for example, blocks port 25 unless you have a fixed IP address. However, it’s easy to cope with, as long as the mail server can be configured to relay all outgoing messages via the ISP’s ‘approved’ host, which hMailServer can.

You can configure more than one domain if you want and, once created, add some user accounts for each one. These are created individually, specifying the email address to use, a password, maximum mailbox size and whether the user is an hMailServer administrator or not. You can also set up an automatic reply and forward messages automatically to another account. These and other details are all stored in the MySQL database although Active Directory can be used for authentication, if available.

By default, hMailServer supports both Imap and Pop3 protocols. There’s nothing to turn on or activate, they just work, with little in the way of tuning that can be done here. All you have to do, therefore, is point an email client such as Outlook or Outlook Express at the server, choose the protocol you want to use, specify the account and password, and all should be well.