Hosted messaging can lighten the load for your customers. Here's how.

Yes, your customers can use hotmail, yahoo mail or even ZDNet mail for their hosted e-mail, but it might not be a wise move. After all, free e-mail services are as far beyond accountability as the moon is from Earth.

When your customers want to get serious about e-mail, you have two options: Install an internal systemââ,¬"which can be time consuming and costlyââ,¬"or turn to a serious, carrier-grade, hosted e-mail solution. In this article, we'll discuss the latter.

Making money from mail
One way to e-mail hosting profitability is to enter the mail outsourcing business like such companies as Commtouch, Critical Path and Electric Mail Company. Typically, those types of businesses provide mail services to other service providers like ISPs or ASPs, or directly to corporate customers. According to a forthcoming report by Ferris Research, a market and technology analysis house specialising in messaging, outsourcing e-mail will remain a rapidly growing business because of customer IT staff shortages and hosted e-mail's reduced costs.

Another path is simply to add hosted mail services to your menu of ISP or internal mail services. While it may be impossible to make those services separate billing-line items to your customer, you should be able to increase your overall billing rate by delivering improved e-mail capabilities.

The software basics

First, your e-mail server must be Internet-mail capable. That means, at the least, it should support Post Office Protocol (POP) and Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). If your customers intend to use PCs in the office and laptops on the road, Internet Mail Access Protocol (IMAP) is a must. With IMAP, mail resides on the server so a user doesn't have to waste time transferring messages from one machine to another. Other popular mail protocols, like Microsoft's Messaging Application Programming Interface or Lotus' Vendor-Independent Messaging, are next to useless for Web mail hosting purposes.

A modern mail server also should be Web-mail capable. While host-based Web e-mail is almost always slower than a POP/SMTP server-client combination, the fact that you can check mail from any Web-connected device makes it wildly popular.

To use Web mail safely, though, you must take extra care on both the server and client side. At a minimum, the Web server should support 40-bit Secure Sockets Layer for e-mail connections. IMAP's host-based message storing also helps ensure that valuable messages aren't left behind on public access PCs. But none of that will help if the user doesn't understand that he must clear any public Web browser's cache after reading mail, lest the next user can easily read his last messages.

For hosting purposes, virtual mail domains also are a must. With that ability, a single mail server can handle the messaging load for multiple domains. For example, with iPlanet Messaging Server you can set up such e-mail domains as accounting.bigcompany.com and marketing.bigcompany.com without the expense of additional server software or registering new domains.

One thing that's new, however, is the growing demand for wireless e-mail capability. The popularity of Blackberry handheld devices, which offer wireless e-mail, proves that customers aren't willing to wait for a winner to be declared in the standards battle between Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) and i-Mode. So make sure the e-mail server you choose supports wireless devices.

Aim high

Regardless of which e-mail server you deploy, it must be highly scalable. The more scalable the server, the higher your potential cash flow. Volume and still more volume from multiple customers is the key to generating profits from e-mail's razor-thin margins.

Topflight directory support also is a plus in any hosted e-mail solution. At a minimum, use a directory that supports Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). Your two top candidates are the iPlanet Directory Server and Novell's eDirectory (formerly Novell Directory Services). Non-LDAP oriented directories, like Microsoft's Active Directory, aren't even on the map.

Because of all those factors, Lotus Domino and Microsoft Exchange often aren't the best choices for a hosted e-mail solution. Instead, iPlanet's iPlanet Messaging Server, Openwave's (formerly Software.com) InterMail and Post.Office, and Sendmail's Advanced Message Server are the names that service providers trust. Other Unix-based mail servers, such as qmail and Postfix, also are popular, but they lack organised support options and can only be considered by shops with in-house expertise.

As you might guess, successful e-mail hosting also relies on scalable operating systems. According to David Ferris, research director for Ferris Research, the most popular operating systems for e-mail hosting are Sun Solaris, IBM AIX and HP-UX. Linux is winning converts, thanks to its low cost and the imminent release of Linux 2.4. Windows NT, meanwhile, was a niche player at best in this arena, and Windows 2000 only now is starting to show up in host e-mail deployments.

The hardware basics

No matter the chip inside, all e-mail servers need plentiful memory and disk resources. Given a choice between a faster processor and more RAM, with e-mail servers you should always opt for more memory.

As for disk requirements, you should have at least a giga- byte of disk room for every 1,000 users. You can get by with less, but you'll be asking for trouble.

Needless to say, all your e-mail servers also should be dedicated servers. Big-time mail hosters also find that it's worth their time to keep a dedicated domain name services (DNS) server on tap. Ideally, a DNS server should be only a Fast Ethernet link away from the mail servers.

iPlanet messaging server

If the name doesn't sound familiar, that might be because you've only known iPlanet Messaging Server (IMS) 5.0 from its two immediate ancestors: Sun Internet Mail Server (SIMS) 4.0 and Netscape Messaging Server (NMS) 4.15. While there have been earlier versions of it, IMS is the first completely merged version.

IPlanet Messaging Server's ancestors have a reputation for being good, solid mail servers with high reliability. Mail administrators like it because, combined with iPlanet Directory Server and its most common deployment on Sparc systems running Solaris, it gives them a familiar suite for the most demanding mail jobs. While IMS currently supports only Solaris, a forthcoming edition will also support Red Hat Linux.

But that new version, out since November, does combine two very different feature sets. The core mail transfer agent, for example, is from Innosoft (by way of SIMS). But the message store is derived mostly from NMS. From our hands-on experience and ISP reports, that hybrid blend mail server is, nevertheless, flawless. But cautious mail administrators might want to wait until IMS 5.1 arrives shortly. While that version will primarily offer better localisation features, it also will include bug fixes.

Openwave InterMail and Post.Office

Do you want to serve millions of e-mail customers? If you do, Openwave has the mail server for you. The company's InterMail 5.0 carrier-level server can handle millions of customers. Just ask customers like @Home and Excite.

InterMail shares all the same characteristics of the other top mail servers: remote server control, centralised configuration, and so on. Its other excellent features, such as its distributed nature and dynamic load-balancing, can't be equaled on other systems ... but it requires lots of configuration know-how.

Unlike IMS, InterMail supports a wide variety of operating systems like AIX, Compaq's Tru64 Unix (formerly Digital Unix), HP-UX, NT and Solaris.

Where InterMail steps out from its competition is with its extras. For example, you can provision users' e-mail clients remotely and the system comes with its own set of billing tools. In short, InterMail doesn't just give your customers great mail service with all the trimmings, it gives you what you need to deploy a complete business mail solution.

The one exception to that is small businesses. InterMail is overkill for anyone with less than a thousand users. For small-to-midsize businesses, Openwave offers Post.Office 3.5.

Sendmail Advanced Message Server

Love it or hate it, you can't ignore Sendmail. The open-source version runs on every Unix system known to man and many other operating systems, besides. So it is that today Sendmail is a heavyweight mail server that canââ,¬"and doesââ,¬"handle more mail every day than any other server around.

There's no wonder why. Besides every version of Unix, Sendmail also supports Windows NT. The commercial version, Advanced Message Server (AMS), only currently supports Red Hat Linux and Solaris. That's changing. In November, IBM and Sendmail inked a deal that will extend AMS to support other Linuxes, AIX, OS/400, OS/390, NT and Windows 2000.

And, despite a reputation as being difficult to use, it deserves its popularity. To put it bluntly, Sendmail just works. In its early days, Sendmail was thought of as being very insecure. As the years have gone by and the code has been debugged, that image is no longer deserved.

Let's take a commercial break
While the open-source Sendmail remains somewhat difficult to use, as partisans of qmail and Postfix always point out, the commercial version of Sendmail is quite another matter. Sendmail Advanced Message Server has all of Sendmail's speed, reliability and scalability virtuesââ,¬"plus impressive administrative interfaces that you'll surely appreciate.

Until recently, however, critics thought Sendmail might not meet the needs of 21st century e-mail usersââ,¬"especially mobile workers and road warriors. But that concern no longer is valid, thanks to recent developments on the business front. With Sendmail's purchase of Nascent Technologies last month, commercial Sendmail now includes the Sendmail Mobile Message Server. That will give Sendmail partners the power to easily deliver Web-enabled messages or wireless e-mail via either WAP or i-Mode. Sendmail enters this century ready for your biggest e-mail challenges.

Lotus Domino and Microsoft Exchange

Domino and Exchange get the headlines, but for hosted e-mail they don't necessarily get the business. The reason is simple: scalability.

Enterprise mail servers like Domino and Exchange typically handle thousands of users. Carrier-level servers must handle hundreds of thousands. And, Microsoft-sponsored testing to the contrary, many e-mail service providers question whether Exchange 2000 can handle a global e-mail load.

Still, many Domino and Exchange customers are outsourcing those servers. As Ferris puts it, "[Customers] want to outsource the devil they know inside." As a result, full service xSPs like Intermedia advertise their Internet capable e-mail service, Intermedia Messenger Mail, while also providing Notes-based mail for customers who demand it.

Listen to the pros
In our experience from a customer's viewpoint, neither Exchange nor Domino works well as Internet mail servers. Both products' Web interfaces are frightfully slow. Sure, Exchange and Domino run well with their native clients, Outlook and Notes, respectively. But Outlook is bedeviled with security problems and the Notes client is a classic example of bloated software.

Moreover, Domino and Exchange are not cost-productive for xSPs because "they're very support-intensive," notes Ferris. More support means more cost. And in the price-sensitive world of e-mail, making up those labor costs isn't easy for service providers.

Simon Hayward, a research director at the Gartner Group, puts it another way. In a report titled "Notes-Domino: Your Legacy or Your Future," Hayward writes: "Internet standardisation has effectively reduced e-mail products to commodity status, so there is rarely a business justification for changing from one of the latest generation products to another."

That's an overstatement. Still, it does illuminate one point. Unless your customer is willing to pay extra for an enterprise mail system like Domino or Exchange, you should recommend pure Internet mail servers. The costs are cheaper and the profits certainly are higher.

Take our word for it.

Cleaning up spam

Except for the senders, no one likes spam. Indeed a recent Gartner Group study found that a third of ISP customers want their service provider to stop the spam flow. Fortunately, you can use antispam server programs to block those nagging messages.

Most mail servers come with some type of built-in spam protection. Although, that functionality sometimes is buried with antiviral protection and can be hard to set up properly.

For ideal spam control, your best bet remains deploying third-party products that work with your hosted e-mail system. Based on our experiences, the spam filter we like most is Brightmail's Solution Suite.

Unlike other antispam programs, Solution Suite is dynamically updated from Brightmail's constantly updated spam databases. That means you can spend your time focused on providing speedier service instead of constantly manually adjusting your spam filters.

Swat those bugs away
Would you want to see a virus crawl into your PC from a message? Of course not, and neither do your users.

Unfortunately, many corporate customers shrug their shoulders at labor hours lost because of a viral infection. That should not continue. The International Computer Security Association says 87 percent of virus infections occur via e-mail attachments, a jump from 56 percent in 1999 and 32 percent in 1998. Because e-mail has widely replaced the floppy disk as a fast way for sharing files, that's hardly surprising.

One thing you can do to try to stop worms and their ilk in their tracks is wean users away from Microsoft Outlook. That may sound like a drastic step, but the arrival of Outlook transmitted diseases like Melissa and ILOVEYOU are cause for concern. Microsoft may beg to differ, but using Outlook for reliable e-mail is like relying on the Titanic for reliable transportation.

Your main job, however, is to make sure that no viruses ever arrive in anyone's mailbox in the first place. To stop viruses at the server levels, the leading products are Trend Micro's InterScan VirusWall and ScanMail and GFi's Mail Essentials for Exchange/SMTP for Exchange and Notes servers.

Small servers for small biz
Suppose you only need to handle mail for a few dozen to a few hundred users? There are products out there made just for you. Sure, you can deploy Sendmail or Post.Office. But there also are easy-to-use Windows NT and Windows 2000 packages for situations where you want to install and forget simple e-mail servers. The ones we've tested and recommend in that category are: Gordano's NTMail and Ipswitch's impressive IMail Server.

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