I am planning the migration of a small (5 users) workgroup from peer to peer file sharing to a proper server, with network home directories, proper backup etc. and mail.

Our domain is currently hosted with a third-party (a shared box with media temple, if it matters), who handle web, ftp, mail and provide email boxes accessible via pop or imap. AT the moment the clients access this directly.

Windows Server’s mail services offer an option whereby the server logs onto remote mail boxes (i.e. on mediatemple) as a pop client, downloads the mail to local mailboxes and then offers imap (or Exchange, obviously) connection to local clients. So in effect, local clients think I’m running a mail server, and the messages themselves sit centrally on the server for backup etc, but mail from ‘outside’ goes to our media temple server, not to us. For sent mail the process works in reverse, with windowes server logging into the remote mail server as an SMTP client. My question is, can I do this with mac OS server? Becasue I’ve read all the documentation and found nothing – just stuff about how to configure postfix, which doesn’t seem like what I want.

My motivation is that I just don’t want to be running mail.domain.com myself, because then I have to worry about DNS and uptime and what to do if my ISP goes down and anyway my ISP might make me pay more for a fixed IP and open ports. And I certainly don’t want to host the website myself. But equally, I don’t want to just set my clients to access the mediatemple mailboxes direct by imap, because then I can’t do my nice neat central backups (except by backing up the home directories or FTPing into the mediatemple server).

Does this make sense? Can I do what I want? or am I worrying too much?