free smpt/pop3 server software recommendations

Question

can anyone recommend free smpt/pop3 server software? I need to be able to make my own email and send my own mail.

Answer 1

Theres a few problems with running your own server - many ISPs frown in it often blocking ports, and vast blocks of dynamic dns addresses are blacklisted by many blacklists. I'd agree with mercury mail server if you have to run your own, but getting a google hosted account sounds like a better idea to me, unless you need a bigger than 2 gb mailbox, and more users than google provides

Answer 2

mercury does good and is easy to work with, plus it is bundled in with xampp which makes configuration even easier yet.

Answer 3

Check out SmarterMail from SmarterTools at http://www.smartertools.com/smartermail/free-mail-server.aspx

It's a full featured professional level mail server (SMTP/POP3/IMAP) that runs on XP. They give away a restricted edition of their enterprise version as a free trial. It has all the features of their full blown enterprise class email server but limited to a single domain name and 10 user accounts. But that's plenty for a typical home or very small business. I found out about it because it's the email server used by my internet hosting provider.

It works quite well, but I should warn you that it's not trivial running your own mail server. With the Spam problem the way it is, configuring and maintaining a server securely is much harder than setting up an email client. You'll have lots of complex decisions to make about how you want to set it up.

If you're not a computer networking technician (and the fact that you're asking this on superuser.com and not serverfault.com makes me think that's likely the case) you should really consider letting someone else run the mail server (like Google or Microsoft).