The new Smartmail mail server by Smartspace has finally been launched and what a ride it has been!

When we originally switch to the previously location of the mail server, (which was the same server as the website) we had hoped that it would be its home for many years. Alas, that did not turn out to be the case.

About 12 months ago i decided that i needed a more high performance model, which was more reliable and easier to upgrade  - I found the current website server at Linode.com.

I have been extremely happy with the Linode setup, and the website server is performing extremely well, but i had problems setting up the mail server, so decided to leave on the legacy website server until I found a better solution.

At the start of the year (2012) I decided that I would set up a dedicated mail server on another Linode server, thus separating out the web server and the mail server, meaning that both email and web would not be both affected if either was down for any reason.

Also, peaks in using of either would not affect the performance of the other.

I started the long search for a good mail server solution and found IRedMail, a prepackaged open source solution which was supposedly easy to install.

To my surprise, the system installation went extremely smoothly and i was able to do a lot of testing and reinstallation of the system a number of times to ensure I could easily get it right on the real thing.

Unfortunately, the course of true mail server love never runs smooth, and I had trouble finding a practical solution to migrate the substantial amount of emails stored on the server and accessed by webmail.

Because we were setting up a special Ldap server capable of using Global address books, most of the attempts failed to work easily until I came across a program called Larch. Once i got the setup right, I almost fell of my chair when emails started to migrate to my shiny new server. The tension almost completely dissipated when I opened a webmail account and saw that all emails were there and in there correct folders!

Success!!

Smartspace customers can continue to access their webmail through their website webmail sub domain (eg. webmail.mywebsite.com), but now they can also access secure webmail at https://smartmailhq.com