|
Excellent list, Matt.
Some of this I've allready discovered durring my
tests.
Hopefully people at smartertools can read
this.
At the moment I hope they will address at least the most
important things. A wrong sorted send folder is nothing against something
that will bring us admins critical errors or problems, especially in ISP
enviroments.
As I've seen Smartermail seems to be working great and
beeing developed in a more actual and future-save ".NET-style" instead of
"CGImail" but at the moment I can't switch to Smartermail
without
a.) keeping some of our users on IMail
or
b.) take away some features that are important for some of
our users and also spam detection.
For example consider SMTP-AUTH:
Most of our - and I believe not only our - customers are
using Outlook as EMail Client.
There is an excellent test in spam filtering called
CMDSPACE. It's very simple and resource-friendly. It's also pretty reliable and
last but not least it's catching a significant part of all incomming
spam.
The problem: Any message comming from one of our customers
using MS Outlook will also fail this test. As an ISP we cannot whitelist a
certain IP-range and need the ability to whitelist all users that has
authenticated before sending out messages trough our server. Simple cause and -
I believe - simply to solve. Let's see what will happen with
v3.
Markus
From:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Behalf Of Matt
Sent: Monday, August 08, 2005 9:54
PM
To: Declude.JunkMail@declude.com
Subject: Re:
[Declude.JunkMail] SmarterMail vs iMail
I have actually moved my hosted E-mail over to SmarterMail despite
my displeasure with the lack of ability to block non-authenticated messages
and the way that they handled the answers. I came to the conclusion that
SmarterMail just wasn't very well set up to handle the deluge of requests from
their customers (or didn't respond appropriately), but other companies in this
space will mostly not do a very good job themselves. For me, since I am
not doing any Declude stuff on SmarterMail, and I don't have a ton of hosted
E-mail business, I figured that I could tolerate the shortcomings for a period
of time and so I took the leap. Having scanning and hosted E-mail on the
same server presented bigger challenges for me and I need to rectify them for
QOS reasons (scanning can be bursty).
SmarterMail 2.6 is definitely a
'green' product, though certainly not as green as it's predecessors. I
would imagine that it all depends on one's specific requirements, and how
willing they might be to wait for a new version of SmarterMail that should
address some of the issues. 3.0 is rumored to start development at some
point in the near future.
After moving over to SmarterMail for hosted
E-mail, I started taking a list of it's shortcomings, both in comparison to
IMail, and also generically (some of which might also be shortcomings of
IMail). If I was using Declude on my SmarterMail box, the list would be
different. There is one big issue for me with Declude and SmarterMail
being that it has no capability for WHITELIST AUTH, but the value of this will
be different for every administrator. So anyway, here's a list of things
that I have found and that people should watch out for if they matter to
them:
1) Mailbox sizes can't be locked down. Domain
admins can override the default value set by the system administrator, so in
effect there is no control over what your domain admins might set for mail
box sizes.
2) Built-in antispam whitelists are based on the Mail From
address matching a local user instead of something that checks to see if it
was authenticated. I consider this to be a beginner's error in spam
blocking technique and ultimately this was one of the things that prevented
me from constructing a work-around for restricting E-mail to only what was
authenticated or came from my scanning server.
3) Built-in antispam
will count any A record returned from a blacklist query as a positive hit
regardless of the value returned.
4) No capability for Program
Aliases.
5) Autoresponder can't be removed from the webmail
interface. I don't allow autoresponders from the server due to looping
and backscatter issues, and I could only break the functionality and change
the label to show that it was disabled. This has already resulted in
customers asking me to re-enable it. On IMail I was able to remove the
option entirely.
6) Catch-all (nobody) addresses can't be disabled
from the domain administrator's interface. I think we all know how bad
catch-all's are these days, and while the system admin's interface allows
you to disable it, it still is functional, or at least the interface to it
is.
7) Uses a proprietary mailbox format. Mailbox files are a
mix of binary and ASCII data. This limits options when editing a
mailbox manually, and it also presents challenges for migrating to other
systems from SmarterMail. I'm not sure to this day how to approach
editing a mailbox in the same ways that I did on IMail.
8) IMail
import utility produces inconsistent config files in comparison to the ones
generated when adding domains directly through SmarterMail. This makes
doing global search and replace operations on the XML to fix issues
following the import a delicate operation.
9) Logging default path is
always appended with "\log". Using a default path of "D:\" will result
in logs being saved in "D:\log".
10) No capability to track the last
login date for a user's account.
11) No tool for deleting messages by
date similar to IMail's immsgexp.exe. This isn't as big of a deal
since mailbox files are split into different files based on the date so
scripting the process isn't that difficult, but it's not
built-in.
12) Webmal doesn't display message list in the same screen
as the message content. This is an important feature if you have a lot
of E-mail in an account that you intend to review in webmail as you have to
either just use the Next button or go back to the summary list after each
message view. This is a major issue for me in an otherwise nice
webmail interface. It makes spam review in SmarterMail's Web interface
completely impracticable.
13) Lacks a 'chaining' mechanism similar to
IMail where the SMTP service will call apps like Declude prior to handing
things off to the queue. SmarterMail relies on a configurable delay
and a call to an executable, but it doesn't manage the process. This
delay is the same for every message and so you must for instance wait for
test messages to pass through the system, and it can present problems for
servers that are overloaded to the extent that the executable can't finish
in time for the message to be picked up by the queue. I would imagine
that Declude has been creative in addressing this issue for their own
purposes.
14) Webmail skinning system has a bug that won't update
skins if you have moved the webmail directory to a location other than the
default.
15) Most parts of the webmail interface can't be modified
for format due to their reliance on DLL's to serve the vast majority of the
interface. Modifications are primarily limited to icons, text labels,
font sizes and colors.
16) No sub-mailbox functionality. In
IMail you could deliver E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
and the message would be delivered to the "somefolder" folder within [EMAIL PROTECTED]'s account (if you
allowed this behavior in IMail Admin). IMail also allowed you to set
up your E-mail client to check sub-folders without checking the entire
account.
17) No auto-suspend functionality for failed logins on
either the webmail interface or SMTP. This is a security issue that
needs to be addressed otherwise servers are wide open for brute force
attacks. IMail lacks the SMTP protections, but does have this
capability for webmail.
18) Sent folder in webmail sorts by the From
address (same as the account that is logged in) instead of the To
address.
This is definitely not a complete list
and it was written from one person's perspective. There are reportedly
many shortcomings in their listserv functionality that I have only started to
dive into, but they are apparently aware of those.
SmarterMail is
however a very, very lean and seemingly stable mail server. I have about
400 accounts hosted on it and it hardly registers any load. There is no
scanning on the server however, and my webmail load is light as almost
everyone uses SMTP. Attached is a graph from today showing the CPU load
on my server with one minute samples. Note that the peaks at around 1
a.m. and 1 p.m. are from backup software, otherwise it is almost dead
silent. This is a single 3.06 GHz Xeon with 1 GB of memory and 4 x
15,000 RPM SCSI drives in RAID 5 configuration on a zero-channel Adaptec RAID
card.
The bottom line for me is that I expect some of the rough edges
to get solved, though I don't expect that to happen without effort from users
like us telling them that we desire certain things be changed or added.
I plan to share my list with them eventually. In the mean time, for my
needs, it is just good
enough.
Matt
|
