I know that cost is a big thing with many, but if you really work it
out, upgrades for both can be comparable if you buy your IMail SA from a
supplier that doesn't mark it up that much. SmarterMail on a one-year
upgrade cycle, and they have no upgrade protection, and they don't
include support in their license beyond one credit per purchase.
Personally I'm not happy with the support that I did receive as they
took my bug report and were verbally dismissive of it and they never got
back to me. Their CEO participates on the message board, but he doesn't
like anyone saying anything negative and gets defensive and dismissive.
This isn't universal, though I tend not to ask for support on everyday
stuff and that may be where they do a good job.
There are six main things that I don't like about SmarterMail:
1) Very little control over the domain-admin and user interfaces.
This includes hacking the layout, and especially hiding buttons.
They have a sub-mailbox functionality for instance that can't be
hidden from domain admins, and also things like spam blocking tools
which I don't use and can be confusing. Essentially most features
that you would want to hide can't be hidden without some very
convoluted hacking with DHTML (JavaScript and CSS).
2) Their spooling will retry only 4 times, after which the message
will be bounced. You can set the delay for each retry, but there is
no setting for retrying until a certain point of tries or time.
This might have changed in 4.x.
3) They store E-mail in a binary encoded format which makes them
uneditable beyond changing the content of a message. You can't
manually remove messages from a mailbox file or do things like merge
two mail box files together. The interface seems to be the only way
to go about doing this stuff.
4) Size limitations can only be controled by the administrator as a
total for a domain. Domain admins can change their default mail box
sizes and the sizes of established mailboxes through the interface
with no way to stop them that I am aware of.
5) They have a issue with their service locking mailboxes
occasionally that requires me to reboot to free up the lock. Others
have also experienced this so it is real. I don't know if this has
been fixed in 4.x, but this is also the issue that I reported to
them and they blew off.
6) Sometimes they don't listen to reasonable things without an
uproar. We saw this happen on this very list when there was a group
of us that was unhappy about their lack of AUTH enforcement on port
587. The Declude folk helped push that issue with them, and they
only then said that they would change it. Of course, this is a
common occurance everywhere from a lowely user perspective, and some
companies never listen.
Those are the things that I didn't catch in doing my initial review that
I really wish were different. There are some real nice things about it
too, and when you change providers you also lose the years of baggage
from the other one and start fresh. I've been on the fence about
migrating back to IMail; for a while I was definitely going back and
then I saw version 4 of SmarterMail, and then last week the CEO made me
unhappy and took a real odd stance on providing some form of upgrade
protection (pretty much indicated that if we didn't like it, we should
go and find something else...and best wishes too). If I go to 4.x, it
will be the third time in 1 1/2 years that I will have been paying them
for their software, or around $1,000 a year at the current clip. That
will average out over time, but it's less of a bargain for me than it
appears. When you purchase, what size and version, and how often you
upgrade will all have an effect, and this is not universal.
The new car is never as nice as it is on the first day you drive it, so
pay careful attention when you are reviewing. SmarterMail is no doubt
the best when it comes to third-party automation through things like
control panels.
Regarding your Declude issues, if you run 3.x or 4.x that should fix the
issue. I have no big issues with Declude and IMail 8.22, though I am
also behind Alligate which keeps a lot of the trash out that can cause
exceptions in things like Declude or Queue Manager.
Matt
Bill Green dfn Systems wrote:
Well now that we have moved from IMail 8.15 to 8.22, we are now
experiencing the problem where Declude needs to be restarted regularly
to correct an apparent memory leak. I remember following threads about
this problem and how the upgrade to IMail 2006.1 generally solved the
problem.
Since we are going to have to change to the new IMail platform anyway
and our support agreement is up for renewal, I have been reviewing
SmarterMail. The apparent benefits I've seen so far are lower cost,
lower resource utilization (especially WebMail), and support beyond
IMail's 8X5 hours.
The only downsides I see so far are user re-education, and that it
seems to lack SMTP Relay for specified IPs.
So, Would any SmarterMail Admins like to share from actual experience
to date?
Bill Green
dfn Systems
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