InformationWeek

June 21, 1999

E-Mail Showdown

We test four E-mail systems based on Internet standards--CommuniGate Pro, Eudora WorldMail, IMail, and N-Plex-to see which one comes out on top

By Alan Zeichick

Related links:

sidebar: E-Mail Systems Test Methods

Related links from our sister publications:

InternetWeek Standards-Based E-Mail For The Enterprise

InternetWeek E-Mail Has Become A Mission-Critical App

Windows The Dangers of E-Mail

Windows E-Mail from Any App

T departments face many choices when setting up an E-mail system, perhaps the most pervasive and important application offered by enterprise networks. Should IT manage it in-house or outsource it? If managed internally, should it be based on a more-or-less proprietary system--such as Microsoft Exchange, or Lotus cc:Mail or Notes--and offer unique services such as threaded messaging or powerful groupware features? Or should the server and its clients be based strictly on Internet standards, offering more choice and flexibility for platforms and components?

This review doesn't attempt to answer those questions; there are strong arguments for outsourcing and for keeping E-mail inside. And the debate between open and closed E-mail systems is different for every enterprise. For this review of E-mail products, we make a few important assumptions--E-mail will be kept inside the company and it will be based on Internet standards, namely the POP3 and IMAP4 standards for client access to the server. We also assume the company will host its E-mail system on a single Windows NT 4 server, so only small and midsize companies are addressed.

Another important assumption: Traditionally, E-mail administrators have maintained one user database, while the network administrator maintains another. Keeping those directories synchronized is an eternal challenge. Thanks to the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, there is now a standard way to share databases. For this test, it's assumed that the user directory will be accessible via some form of LDAP version 3 connector, at least to the extent of allowing an LDAP client to browse and search the directory.

We had hoped these products would offer extensive support for external LDAP-compliant directories instead of their own user directory, but that feature doesn't seem to be broadly offered by Internet-standard E-mail packages. Maybe next year.

For this review, we primarily investigated how easy each E-mail system is to set up, access, and administer by a small or midsize business. Setup is defined as the process of installing the E-mail software and its directory onto a clean Windows NT 4 Service Pack 4 server, and connecting it to our Internet gateway--a process made simple by telling our firewall to redirect inbound Simple Mail Transfer Protocol traffic to that particular server during its evaluation.

Access is defined as the process of setting client software (we've used Outlook Express and Eudora Pro E-mail, our in-house client) to access the server to send and receive mail using POP3 and IMAP4.

Administration tests the usability of the server's administration console and features. (For a detailed description of our test environment, see sidebar story, "E-Mail System Test Methods")

We looked at the value-added features each E-mail server offers. The most crucial one is E-mail access via the Web; today it's an option, but tomorrow it'll likely be a basic requirement. We also looked for fax or paging gateways, mailing lists, user access to E-mail forwarding, and auto-reply, as well as the users' ability to browse the LDAP directory.

Also important is protection from malicious users through spam filtering, access blocking, server-side virus checking, and the ability to limit the server's Simple Network Management Protocol mail-relay activities.

Performance and scalability were not tested. Given a typical enterprise server platform, all of the products examined can support the hypothetical customer envisioned for this review, running a few hundred users off a single server, with a message load of a few thousand of messages per day.