Whilst users have been excited about the backup and remote access capabilities Windows Home Server brings to the home, many have cited the lack of a mail server as a major weakness of the product. Clearly, the WHS team are aware of the community’s desire for a mail server within Windows Home Server, but this is one area in which the product is differentiated from other Enterprise-focused offerings.
That’s not to say, however, that you can’t run a third-party mail server on WHS. WGS reader Dave Marchant has been successfully running Mercury Mail Server on his home server for sometime. I’m delighted to say he has written a detailed and extensive guide to running Mercury on WHS, which, advanced users can walkthrough to get the software up and running on your home server.
The guide is in PDF format, which you can download from the link below.
A big thank you to Dave for pulling this together for WGS - please feel free to discuss and comment on the guide below or on WGS Forums.
More Information: Running Mercury Mail Server on WHS | Discuss
January 30th, 2008 at 9:57 am
I’m not sure why people are so keen to do this, rather than rely on their ISP or say Google Apps to host their email. They would have much, much better uptime, IMHO.
January 30th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
It’s not a matter of wanting to receive mail on WHS, it’s a matter of wanting centralized storage of their mail on WHS in order to be able to check mail from multiple PCs (maybe a laptop and a desktop) without multiple copies floating around. And before you say “leave it at your ISP/Google”, let me make this point - I’ll leave my email with a provider long-term when the provider takes responsibility for my data and stops putting “we’re not responsible” disclaimers in their infinitely amendable terms of service.
January 30th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
I’m with you Randy - I don’t trust Google, Yahoo, Microsoft or any other online service to keep my personal or my business email safe and secure. Gimme a nice home solution over any of them, thany you very much
January 30th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
I’ve used http://www.hmailserver.com/ on mine. Having read the PDF I’d say it may be slightly easier to install, as it has the service installed built in.
The other useful feature is DNS blacklists amongst it’s many anti-spam features
January 30th, 2008 at 10:00 pm
Rex, Do you have webmail working with your hmailserver?
February 8th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
Will hmailserver run on WHS?
February 23rd, 2008 at 5:45 am
I just installed Mercury Mail, and now i had setup my clients. How would I get all my mail to download from the server to multiple PC’s using Outlook. I currently have a POP3 set up. Also has anyone tried using the HTTP Mail function, and if so, what are the setting to get it going?
March 12th, 2008 at 6:55 pm
To receive on multiple PC’s, your best solution is setting up the server for IMAP instead of POP3.
March 12th, 2008 at 7:10 pm
Thanks for the info. I just need someone to assist me with the steps to setup the server for IMAP.
March 16th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Hi,
I’m not an expert just a general home user with a little bit of expirence with PC’s so my question maybe a bit stupid. Anyway here goes, how would I go about setting up diffrent mail accounts for diffrent users i.e three accounts which would be kept seperate from each other so my wife and kids couldnt see my emails and I couldnt see theirs. They logon to the home laptop sign in with their details and receive only their emails. The email addresses would all be the same (@myemail.co.uk) except for the bit before the @ which would be for example dad@myemail.co.uk, mum@myemail.co.uk, daughter@myemail.co.uk.
Hope that all makes sense and thanks for any replies
March 23rd, 2008 at 2:35 pm
For those interested in this topic, you might want to also look into SmarterMail http://www.smartertools.com, it’s a very nice mail server and also has an excellent webinterface.
May 2nd, 2008 at 12:40 pm
I agree with Tom. SmarterMail is a fantastic app, I’ve had it running for the past 2 months without any issues. The wife loves the GUI and it was a doddle to install. Best of all I can use it from my works network (they bloack all bublic e-mail servers like gmail, msn etc…) Smaretmail can be instaleld a s a virtual directory so to log I navigate to http://www.yourhomeserver.com/SmarterMail
Best of it’s free for a single domain with less than 10 users
May 21st, 2008 at 11:21 am
Sir i am a router guy i want to know about server wil any body will guide me
August 11th, 2008 at 3:53 am
I installed this server and it continually crashes a few minutes after you start the service…no big deal this may be something I did in setting it up and I can try again…for the moment my question however is how do I uninstall it. It doesn’t show up in the add remove programs section and there is no uninstall option with the software?…help?
August 19th, 2008 at 6:02 am
Hi,
I’m trying to set up mercury like the guide instructed, but when I get to the part where I’m adding user accounts (under manage local users) the program doesn’t do anything after I put in all the info. I can click the ok button as many times as I want but it still doesn’t do anything. The only difference to the guide this far is that I installed SpamHalter and, although I don’t think that’s the cause of the problem, I thought I should mention it.
August 19th, 2008 at 6:06 am
(accidental submition, post continued below)
I can close the “users defined for this system” window and the rest of mercury seems to be working fine. If anyone has encountered this problem before and could help me figure it out please let me know. I know very little about mail servers and any help would be appreciated.
Thanks
October 24th, 2008 at 8:42 pm
Has anybody tried running MDaemon Pro or the free version (http://www.altn.com/Products/MDaemon-Email-Server-Windows/) on it? I have a friend who swears by it, but I am curious if it would run on Home Server.