How does one set up email system for a small organisation. i mean instead using web-based hotmails, yahoos, etc would like @companyname.com addresses. any idea to how to go about setting this up. so i get my domain and then what do i ask for email domain names as well. sorry don't have much knowledge of emails though i can set up users on outlook. what software and technolgy r we talking about, i've heard about ms exchange a lot, is that a possibility. Any private email setup gurus/advisors pls reply. thanks in advance. simon

Being a "small" company which doesn't sound like it has a full time IT staff, I would discourage you from trying to host your own email. It might be a good learning experience, but someone would need to stay on top of security threats, updates, etc. Once you have a domain name you just need to find a company to host your domain. Prices, services and the like can vary greatly. Just do a little research into the various companies. Also didicated hosting company can provide additioal services such as spam filtering, virus scanning, etc. Someone at your company would needt o be the one to "administrate" the email accounts. That person would be responsible for creating and updating the accounts. Then you just need to configure their email clients to retrieve the email through POP3 in most cases. Michael J

Actually its just for my knowledge. Is it the case of having a server. i've heard about sendmail and exchange a lot, which one is preferable you thin and easier setting up simon

Outlook is a client program. It simply communicates with a mail server (which is often called an Mail Transport Agent or MTA). You need a DNS server to setup a mail server (by the book, you're always supposed to have two of these). DNS has what is called an MX ("mail exchange") record. When a mail server is looking to send mail, it requests the MX record for the recipient's domain. Once it has the IP address of the recipient's mail server, it then connects to that host and the transaction is performed. MX is not absolutely necessary if the host for your regular domain is also your mail server. This is not good for all situations. MX records actually have a more important purpose of specifying subdomains for records. Say in mydomain.com your mail server is at mail.mydomain.com. The MX record would reference this. You can also assign alternative mail servers and prioritize them. MS Exchange is not too difficult to setup. Try not to use it if you don't need to. Don't use sendmail. Consider exim, postfix, qmail, or courier. postfix is fairly popular, but if you've never seen a production setup (with various filtering for spam and security) it can seem complicated.