InformationWeek

June 21, 1999

E-Mail Showdown

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InternetWeek E-Mail Has Become A Mission-Critical App

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When it comes to day-to-day administration--user moves, adds, and changes, determining global or per-user maximum mailbox sizes (by megabytes or number of messages), configuring vacation messages and mailing lists, setting aliases, and forwarding addresses--the local IMail Administrator and Web administrator were quick and efficient. The documentation was fine, but hardly needed.

We were pleased to see how easy it was to quickly set such parameters as maximum mailbox size and number of messages. IMAP4 public mailboxes, by the way, are just read-only messages belonging to an E-mail account named public--what could be easier to manage?

IMail includes an LDAP-compatible database for user information. During installation, you can choose to use this directory for user authentication, use the Windows NT domain user database instead, or use an external Open Database Connectivity-compliant database. The software documentation thoroughly describes how to set up the included LDAP server, but contains fewer details about the other options.

The IMail database has a predefined schema; you can't add or change the fields in the database. It is also designed only for E-mail usage: You can't add additional names to the database, except by creating them as user accounts and then disabling their E-mail access. For our test, we used the IMail database. We were pleased to see that it was LDAP-compatible. We were able to browse and search it using all our LDAP clients.

What set IMail apart from the crowd--other than its floppy-disk delivery--was its rich set of additional E-mail features. The control panel applet includes strong anti-spam filtering by allowing the administrator to block not only specific user accounts or domains, but also to limit the SMTP mail-forwarding capabilities to trusted IP addresses. Configuration on SMTP's capabilities is very granular. Users and administrators can set up aliases, forwarding, and vacation notices.

IMail's mail-list capabilities are also excellent, and are implemented via a separate application that scans IMail mailboxes. It includes full automation for users to subscribe and unsubscribe, moderated and unmoderated lists, and public and private lists. Users can even choose to subscribe to daily digests of mailing-list content, rather than receive individual messages.

One feature we would appreciate in a production environment is a paging gateway. IMail supports both simple new-mail notification, and E-mail forwarding to a pager. Faxing is a $195 option; the software can handle outgoing mail to faxes only. There are no provisions for integrating inbound faxes with mailboxes.

One important feature missing is virus scanning or hooks for server-side scanning. With IMail, it remains the responsibility of the client workstation to scan for malicious files.

A significant problem with IMail is price. At $995 for 250 users ($1,495 for unlimited users), it's a fine deal if you have that many users, but in a smaller environment, that's a big first step.

Isocor N-Plex
Isocor's N-Plex Global 2.21 is the big brother to Eudora WorldMail, which is based on an older version of the N-Plex source code. Both products include the same basic E-mail features and management capabilities, with POP3 and IMAP4 client access, as well as APOP authenticated logon to POP3 accounts. N-Plex adds additional features not found in WorldMail, including spam filtering, hooks for antivirus software (not evaluated here), SNMP management, user accounting, and an option for Web E-mail access.