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 it can present problems for servers
that are overloaded to the extent that the executable can't finish in
time for the message to be picked up by the queue. I would imagine
that Declude has been creative in addressing this issue for their own
purposes.
14) Webmail skinning system has a bug that won't update skins if you
have moved the webmail directory to a location other than the default.
15) Most parts of the webmail interface can't be modified for format
due to their reliance on DLL's to serve the vast majority of the
interface. Modifications are primarily limited to icons, text labels,
font sizes and colors.
16) No sub-mailbox functionality. In IMail you could deliver E-mail to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] and the message would be delivered to the
"somefolder" folder within [EMAIL PROTECTED]'s account (if you allowed
this behavior in IMail Admin). IMail also allowed you to set up your
E-mail client to check sub-folders without checking the entire account.
17) No auto-suspend functionality for failed logins on either the
webmail interface or SMTP. This is a security issue that needs to be
addressed otherwise servers are wide open for brute force attacks.
IMail lacks the SMTP protections, but does have this capability for
webmail.
18) Sent folder in webmail sorts by the From address (same as the
account that is logged in) instead of the To address.
This is definitely not a complete list and it was written from one
person's perspective. There are reportedly many shortcomings in their
listserv functionality that I have only started to dive into, but they
are apparently aware of those.
SmarterMail is however a very, very lean and seemingly stable mail
server. I have about 400 accounts hosted on it and it hardly registers
any load. There is no scanning on the server however, and my webmail
load is light as almost everyone uses SMTP. Attached is a graph from
today showing the CPU load on my server with one minute samples. Note
that the peaks at around 1 a.m. and 1 p.m. are from backup software,
otherwise it is almost dead silent. This is a single 3.06 GHz Xeon
with 1 GB of memory and 4 x 15,000 RPM SCSI drives in RAID 5
configuration on a zero-channel Adaptec RAID card.
The bottom line for me is that I expect some of the rough edges to get
solved, though I don't expect that to happen without effort from users
like us telling them that we desire certain things be changed or
added. I plan to share my list with them eventually. In the mean
time, for my needs, it is just good enough.
Matt
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