“To send and receive e-mail” is always cited as the number one reason to use the Internet. Since e-mailing is considered the most important activity on the Web, the number of mail server products is large and growing, even though there are major vendors in this industry.
To effectively embrace Internet Mail as a new business channel for interaction with customers and partners, you need an experienced partner who can tailor solutions to give you a cross-platform competitive advantage with dependable and effective solutions.
IrisLogic offers your business the flexibility to choose from a wide-range of messaging features. Take advantage of IrisLogic’s end-to-end SecurNet Messaging Infrastructure services including:
- Mail architecture & design
- Hardware selection
- Software selection
- Deployment
- Performance Tuning
- Implement email security
- Support
- Migration services
Considerations
For Internet mail servers, a very important factor is the support of standards. The major protocols are SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) for outgoing mail and POP3 (Post Office Protocol) for incoming mail. A more recent protocol is IMAP4 (Internet Messaging Access Protocol), which offers a number of important features, including user management of mail on the server. Other Internet protocols include ESMTP (Extended Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), APOP (Authenticated Post Office Protocol), MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions), and Ph (Directory Access protocol). Many mail servers are also adding S/MIME, SSL, or RSA support (for message encryption) and LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) support (for accessing operating system directory information about mail users). In general, the more standards a server supports, the better.
Due to the increasing volume of e-mail traffic, the scalability of a mail server for an organization can be a major issue. It is also important because mail server products tend to differentiate themselves by the message volume of their target customer and the number of e-mail accounts they support. Some are intended for corporate and enterprise e-mail, often processing millions of messages in a short period of time and providing accounts for more than 100,000 users, while others target small businesses that may handle only a few thousand messages per week and support less than 100 users.
The highly-publicized viruses that attack via mail clients have put the spotlight on e-mail as a major point of vulnerability in an enterprise’s firewall. In response, mail server vendors (along with major client vendors) have begun producing add-ons and built-in features that help to scan e-mail, segregate questionable messages, and deal with viruses and spam mail. As might be expected, this is a rapidly expanding element of e-mail servers and should be considered important when comparing products.
E-mail servers are also know to rank high in installation and management difficulty. That’s because they are tied to inherently variable source (Internet connection and e-mail traffic) and because they require constant attention to user lists, user rights, and message storage. Thus, it’s important to look for servers that provide a certain modicum of ease of use. A GUI interface is nice, but it is not necessarily the route to easy administration. The type of interface is often related to the user’s platform / operating system, and it is important to keep in mind that many products are intended to run solely on a single platform, such as Unix or Windows.