Ipswitch Imail V7.0
Imail has quite a lot going for it: it's relatively inexpensive (although the price of the optional virus scanning balloons the cost), has modest hardware requirements, and in most cases is simple and quick to use.
The developer claims the software is easy to install and we heartily agree; we had it up and running in a matter of minutes. Adding users and giving them access using POP3 and SMTP or even through IMAP4 and a Web browser was easy, although setting up spam filters was a tad more time consuming.
We downloaded the trial version from Ipswitch's Website where you can also buy the package online. Prices start at AU$2216.50 for 250 users, but this does not include a support contract. We feel the extra AU$2871 for a service contract is money well spent. The service contract includes 12 months of major product upgrades and telephone and e-mail tech support.
An unlimited user license weighs in at AU$5555 (without contract) which is still very reasonable. Ipswitch claims Imail will cope with over 100,000 users on a grunty server, and we would certainly be comfortable with at least tens of thousands of clients.
On the topic of hardware, Imail will run on surprisingly little. If you only have a couple of hundred users, you could probably dust off the old low-end Pentium NT server you have sitting in the back room.
As long as it has more than 64MB of memory and a couple of gigs of disk space, it should work fine. Realistically, however, you would probably want a bit more grunt.
For all but the largest applications a moderate Pentium III system would be sufficient. As with all mail servers, though, the more memory and hard drive space you have, the more efficiently the software will run.
As mentioned, there is an antivirus option for Imail, which we did not test, and which is rather expensive--AU$15,004 buys you unlimited user licenses for the antivirus plug-in, 12 months of upgrades and product support. You can score a better deal by bundling user licences, service agreements and antivirus support all together for AU$17,314.
Imail Administrator has a similar look and feel to Exchange's admin tree structure, however the tree is better pruned than Microsoft's. As a consequence, navigating and configuring options is certainly easier. Even though the interface lacks the depth and functions of Exchange, it nevertheless gets the job done.
Imail's console application can be run remotely and has the ability to connect to multiple servers, a very attractive feature if you have servers in more than one location. Imail has built-in monitoring which includes SMTP, POP3, WWW, news, DNS, external router, and disk space. The software can be configured to restart a service automatically and/or notify the administrator by pager or e-mail (the administrator can then remotely restart services manually if required).
Security is quite well supported with SSL, user authentication, exchange of encrypted passwords with APOP or CRAM-MD5, and the ability to block mail from selected IP addresses or domains. While mail relaying from external sources can be blocked, local users can be allowed to relay, where the term "local user" can be defined and configured by the administrator.
In addition to the useful Web mail access, Imail Server includes Web calendaring based on the ICAL standard, so the user can receive a meeting notification from any compliant client and import it directly to their calendar. Although we must admit that Imail's supplied Web e-mail client is fairly basic and not as refined as Exchange's, it's good that it provides this functionality.
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Tree years ago we were wondering which will be the best mail server to deploy in my office ( we are 25 users). The choice were between Xchg (altough we had a lot of troubles when our EXCHANGE Server bundled in MS Small bussines Server crashed and decided to quit Exchange also It was slow and the client was annoyingly slow)and Domino (my friends told me that Domino was rather complex an expensive to deploy).
My solaris trainer told me "Why don´t you use sendmail. It´s free and works fast"
One day I recieved RH6.2 and it took me 15 days to figure out how to deploy the mail service until I´ve found linuxconf :).
It´s been more than two years now, and the machine works very fast and very well . I used the CPU that nobody wanted (P133 48Mb 4Gb machine)
My experience is that those fifteen days spent in learning worth very well because we saved more than 15 thousand dollars. THNX Sendmail Linuxconf & RH!!!