[Declude.JunkMail] SmarterMail vs iMail
I've long been evaluating both SmarterMail and iMail. While offended at the iMail price increases, I am generally pleased with the maturity of the product (trying to track down the cause of mail routing failures, etc. would seem more difficult in SmarterMail). However, I have not used SmarterMail in any production capacity under load. Does anyone have an opinion regarding whether SmarterMail will easily handle 800 users / 50,000 emails daily on the same dual 2.8 gHz/4gb RAM hardware that our iMail install currently runs on? Declude, invURIbl, and Message Sniffer would be running on both platforms. Thanks... --- This E-mail came from the Declude.JunkMail mailing list. To unsubscribe, just send an E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], and type unsubscribe Declude.JunkMail. The archives can be found at http://www.mail-archive.com.
Re: [Declude.JunkMail] SmarterMail vs iMail
I haven't used SmarterMail beyond testing, but the main drawback I've come across is that SMTP AUTH info cannot be passed to Declude from SmarterMail as it is in IMail/Declude. I understand that SmarterTools is working on that, but until it is available it is a showstopper for us. Otherwise I've heard good things about performance and webmail for SmarterMail, but I understand there are a few other features missing that may be important to you as well. See Matt at mailpure's postings mid July on SmarterMail shortcomings for more info. Darin. - Original Message - From: Spaminator [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Declude.JunkMail@declude.com Sent: Monday, August 08, 2005 1:25 PM Subject: [Declude.JunkMail] SmarterMail vs iMail I've long been evaluating both SmarterMail and iMail. While offended at the iMail price increases, I am generally pleased with the maturity of the product (trying to track down the cause of mail routing failures, etc. would seem more difficult in SmarterMail). However, I have not used SmarterMail in any production capacity under load. Does anyone have an opinion regarding whether SmarterMail will easily handle 800 users / 50,000 emails daily on the same dual 2.8 gHz/4gb RAM hardware that our iMail install currently runs on? Declude, invURIbl, and Message Sniffer would be running on both platforms. Thanks... --- This E-mail came from the Declude.JunkMail mailing list. To unsubscribe, just send an E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], and type unsubscribe Declude.JunkMail. The archives can be found at http://www.mail-archive.com. --- This E-mail came from the Declude.JunkMail mailing list. To unsubscribe, just send an E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], and type unsubscribe Declude.JunkMail. The archives can be found at http://www.mail-archive.com.
RE: [Declude.JunkMail] SmarterMail vs iMail
I am currently in your same scenario.. But one step forward perhaps. I am currently starting to test smartermail in a production enviroment (Xeon dual 2.8 Ghz/2Gb Ram). I have studied it for a long time. I run 350 domains with around 4500 users (25K messsages per day). Declude junkmail, antivirus (f-prot) and sniffer (test license) Smartermail lacks of some features compared to Imail but is has a few interesting ones that Imail doesn't have. Major hit is the webmail interface and administration capabilities for each domain. I am runinng Imail and smartermail now. Some domains in smartermail in a production environment. I will let you know how it goes next week. If things goes right I will migrate everything this incoming weekend. I understand from a declude email that the largest smartermail installation they are aware of handles 4 millions messager per day running declude antivirus. -Luis -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Spaminator Sent: Lunes, 08 de Agosto de 2005 12:25 p.m. To: Declude.JunkMail@declude.com Subject: [Declude.JunkMail] SmarterMail vs iMail I've long been evaluating both SmarterMail and iMail. While offended at the iMail price increases, I am generally pleased with the maturity of the product (trying to track down the cause of mail routing failures, etc. would seem more difficult in SmarterMail). However, I have not used SmarterMail in any production capacity under load. Does anyone have an opinion regarding whether SmarterMail will easily handle 800 users / 50,000 emails daily on the same dual 2.8 gHz/4gb RAM hardware that our iMail install currently runs on? Declude, invURIbl, and Message Sniffer would be running on both platforms. Thanks... --- This E-mail came from the Declude.JunkMail mailing list. To unsubscribe, just send an E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], and type unsubscribe Declude.JunkMail. The archives can be found at http://www.mail-archive.com. __ [Email scanned for viruses] [Email escaneado contra virus] __ [Email scanned for viruses] [Email escaneado contra virus] --- This E-mail came from the Declude.JunkMail mailing list. To unsubscribe, just send an E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], and type unsubscribe Declude.JunkMail. The archives can be found at http://www.mail-archive.com.
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
RE: [Declude.JunkMail] SmarterMail vs iMail
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 - Ibelieve - simply to solve. Let's see what will happen with v3. Markus From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of MattSent: Monday, August 08, 2005 9:54 PMTo: Declude.JunkMail@declude.comSubject: 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
