Product Reviews

Any SME wanting to bring cross-company mail routing in-house is faced with a choice of high entry costs, incredibly basic or stupidly complex applications - sometimes all three. Throw in groupware collaboration using Outlook and you're looking at a costly Microsoft Exchange Server installation. Luckily, there's now a solution - MDaemon is a truly affordable alternative via a groupware plug-in.

While setting up and configuring a mail server is easy enough for those experienced in the dark arts, it can be quite daunting for normal folk. For the latter, Zen provides a step-by-step 'easy installation guide', which takes 30 minutes or less.

Despite this ease of use, the program has one of the most comprehensive feature sets around. It's constructed as an incoming hub to route mail from a standard ISP-based POP3 mailbox across the company, and offers management and routing capabilities beyond expectations of such a 'simple' solution.

Other features include a flexible mailing list suite for unlimited list creation, the WorldClient web-based mail client, bandwidth throttling, attachment linking, XML-based contact synchronisation, ODBC, LDAP and SL support, and multiple domain support. Anything not built-in, such as anti-virus scanning,

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is usually available as a plug-in, albeit with additional licence costs. To help maintain system security and integrity, there's built-in automatic IP screening with shielding and relay control features, as well as spam blocking (soon to be upgraded to the integrated SpamAssassin).

But the groupware plug-in is the interesting development, exploiting clever tweaking to use the IMAP protocol to exchange calendar and task data by way of a proprietary scripting code, leaving ordinary IMAP email unaffected. Groupware support includes sharing of all Outlook folders such as contacts, calendar, tasks, journal and notes with configurable permissions.

The WorldClient web-based email app included with MDaemon has been upgraded to use Outlook calendaring from anywhere with web access. Interesting features aren't confined to the application itself. The groupware licence doesn't need to match your MDaemon licence, in that you can purchase a groupware licence to cover just the users who'd benefit from it rather than being forced into a blanket licence upgrade that's larger, and more costly, than actually required.

Of course, you can get this and more from Microsoft Exchange Server, but at a higher cost. For example, £355 buys a six-user licence, albeit by download only. It's the value-for-money aspect that appeals most with MDaemon, especially when balanced against the feature set on offer.

If you're a small to medium-sized company, or fall neatly into the SoHo category, you'll find MDaemon a scaleable and fully featured SMTP/POP3/IMAP4 mail server, with the benefit of Outlook collaboration. The SpamAssassin (www.spamassassin.org) integration and anti-virus scanning plug-in make for a truly compelling all-in-one mail solution. But what ties it all together is that it's as easy to manage as it is to install.