If you are hosting a single website or are a home user, then you probably will have no need of any mail systems that are more complicated than a basic POP3 account. Many people even forgo POP3 accounts in favor of remotely accessible webmail accounts like those provided by Hotmail or Gmail. However, if you’re are running a business, a website and e-mail system that share a domain name relevant to your company’s name adds a certain level of professional prestige, not unlike a good business card. A dedicated mail system can also help you control organization-wide spam filters and security features, an ability that can be invaluable. If you’re company has multiple offices and divisions, then you may end up needing more sophisticated mail delivery systems like a Smart Host.
The goal of a Smart Host is to interface between a centralized mail domain server and multiple independent local mail servers that will be accessed by the relevant users. The idea is to maintain a single e-mail domain that can service multiple divisions. Imagine, for example, that in a couple of years GoodHost.org becomes a huge, multinational corporation with offices in many different companies. Each office will have its own Internet Service Provider (ISP). Ordinarily, any outgoing e-mail would have to use the ISP’s outgoing Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server rather than the centralized delivery service. The reason for this is that most ISPs make it impossible to relay outgoing messages from any IP address which they have not specifically assigned to one of their customers. The goal is to clamp down on spam or otherwise illicit messages being sent from unknown users.
Effectively, this means that each office would have to handle the security for their outgoing mail independently, making sure it isn’t hijacked by spammers, mass-mailer viruses or other exploiters. This can be cumbersome in a large organization. To overcome this difficulty, each office can be setup to send messages through the central SMTP server by relaying their messages through a secure server that authenticates the mail transactions. Such a server can also be used as a backup mail server as it can be configured to store any outgoing messages if, for any reasons, the primary outgoing server cannot be reached. The messages can then be relayed once the primary server’s operation has been restored.
Apart from being useful to homogeneous organizations, a Smart Host can be extremely useful to webhosts who handle the e-mail traffic of all domains they host. The backup system can be invaluable in its own right, but more importantly it can help cut down on spam generated by subscribers who have failed to properly secure their mail programs from hackers or viruses. This level of security can be effected by refusing to allow messages to be transmitted directly, making it possible to implement another level of filtering before mail is sent by requiring that the each message be authenticated and that each relay server will cater to only a predetermined customer list.
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