Joe --

It sounds like you're in one of those discomfiting situations where people aren't clear in what they're asking for, because they don't know what they're asking for.

xDSL or cable modem is OK if you get at least one static IP and the bandwidth provider doesn't mind your running server processes. Some service contracts, especially the cheap ones, have some wacked-out prohibitions against same. This is especially true of cable-modem services.

Given an IP address and the Linux or BSD distribution of your choice, you pick one of the standard Mail Transfer Agent daemons (see: [link|http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/mtas|http://linuxmafia.co...k/linux-info/mtas]) and one or more Mail Delivery Agent daemons (providing mail pickup over IMAP and/or POP3). Answer a few questions for setup, and you're done.

Well, then you start to get the complications: People want to know how to change their mail-access passwords from their desktop machines. You'll be asked to do filtering for MS-Windows malware, and maybe for content. You'll get complaints about spam, as if it were your problem. You'll have some users whose mailboxes grow to absurd sizes, so you'll institute disk quotas to deal with this, and then get complaints from people whose mail bounces because their mailboxes have exceeded quota. You'll probably initially not impose a maximum size on individual mails your MTA will be willing to receive or send, but will get complaints about slow performance caused by the few who send ridiculously large attachments, and so will cap mail size. Whereupon, you'll get complaints from people who file-attach 50MB PowerPoint slideshows without thinking. And so on. Welcome to the world of mail admins.