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Mike Odryna wrote:
With SmarterMail it was fairly easy to migrate users / mail out.... below are some of my notes on SmarterMail when someone asked me about it... I hope this helps someone to either consider or not consider SmarterMail... either way it's good to share evals / info... Migration: They have a free app that will move everything from IMail to SmarterMail. .. users / passwords / email. There are some notes because if someone forwards to multiple accounts then only the first forward is carried over... and a couple of other minor things. Not showstoppers What you get: IMAP, POP, SMTP server with Webmail. The webmail is much better than the stock templates that come with IMail, and I feel like they are nicer than KillerWebMail, but it's debatable. The administration of the server is 100% web based and the Webmail is 100% compatible with Mozilla / FireFox on Mac and PC which is wonderful for me. The SMTP server can listen on 2 ports... so you can do 25 and 587 or well 25 and anything else you want in order to let your users send from ISPs that block port 25. The Webmail can work in IIS which means the box could host more than one website on port 80. They do include their own mini-webserver but they encourage people to use IIS. What you lose: Whois, Passwd, Finger, LDAP servers. If you never used them then you have no loss. They have LDAP in the future roadmap but not any time soon. For me these are non-issues. Certainly a seperate OpenLDAP server could provide you with directory service in the mean time if this was needed. I have sent them comments on how to deal with LDAP in a shared IP configuration so that ISPs could offer LDAP on a per domain basis and restrict the results to particular domains. (for example... Company A can find Company A employees but Company B can only see Company B employees, and either company can have multiple domains, and both companies could be on the same IP address.) Things that are not as nice as what we have now: AV protection... while AV support is built in, it is very light. Basically it will either delete virus mail or bounce it. It's not as flexable as Declude. It does work though with any AV product that uses a quarentine folder. It watches the folder for spool files that appear and knows that a virus was caught if one pops in there. Simple but works. From their support people... "Our product works with Trend Micro, Norton Corporate Edition, McAfee Corporate Edition, and most command-line scanners. We are working with Declude to get them integrated, as I mentioned above. We have not officially tested F-Prot, so we cannot guarantee it will work with our product. Our product can detect quarantined files and reply to the sender, but that is proving to be less and less useful in the current email environment on the web. Most viruses are spoofed now. We recommend just having the anti-virus delete the file. SmarterMail can detect that the file was deleted and react accordingly." AntiSpam. They have a bayseian filter that works better than IMails. I know it does because it takes in to account if someone flags a message as Spam or Ham in the webmail client so the filters will get better and better if you have webmail users. It also does IP blacklists, but only as good as IMail. They don't yet let you see what response the blacklist gave and they don't do Right Hand Side blacklists. I sent them the suggestion to do both and they added it to their list and liked the idea. Security: This is what they wrote me... "Our products are written in 100% managed .Net code, which means that security is much tighter than competing products that have a core in C++ or other languages. We have many large hosting companies that use our products, including 2 of the top 10 Windows web hosts (CrystalTech.com and HostMySite.com, who are currently integrating our product for their customers). We have a very large customer base with tens of thousands of copies of software distributed throughout the world." Support: Email support is always free, and phone support is free for the first 30 days. After that, phone support is $50 per issue. The Company: This is what they wrote me.... "Regarding your last concern, SmarterMail has only been officially released since 7/15/2003, but it was in beta for about a year before it was released. We have a large install base, no venture capitol to pay off, and we're profitable. In short, we're not going anywhere. Our target customers are hosting companies, and we have designed all of our pricing and features around them. We actually like our customers. We value feedback and we have no desire to abandon them." Conclusions: I feel that for the money I'm getting a good migration path. If you look at what they have added to the product in the past year you can see this has a future. The developers have an open mind about enhancements. They have a very logical design to the system. For ISPs they integrate with Helm at the very least. They use XML for their config files which I like. I am especially interested because Declude has been talking to them. Even if they don't make a specific version of Declude for SmarterMail, I still would be able to use the standalone version of Declude that has been mentioned. In either case I would soon have the AV and AntiSpam I like, and perhaps SmarterMail could focus on all the other great things you can do with a mail server if they know Declude can do all the spam and AV stuff for customers that want power. |
Title: RE: [IMail Forum] NEW SVC AGREEMENT PRICES - Please Read
