This is the what they on their site about the
migration tool for Imail Versions 7 & 8:
This converter must be run on the IMail server.
Domains, user aliases, users, mailboxes, and lists are converted to
SmarterMail. Items not converted include domain aliases, content filtering, and
all but the first forwarding address for a user.
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf Of Joshua Levitsky
Sent: Thursday, October 28, 2004
5:06 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [IMail Forum] NEW SVC
AGREEMENT PRICES - Please Read
Mike Odryna wrote:
Great job! This
EVAL. has saved all of us a tremendous amount of time.
Does anyone know how good or bad these options are in
regards to transferring user and Domain info out of IMail
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.
