Product Reviews

The problem that MailMarshal sets out to resolve is really the antithesis of the original PC revolution: this is a tool which helps network managers keep track of what their staff are doing inside emails. It's a market which is simultaneously crowded, complicated and curiously hidden. The vast majority of PC users have no idea that the emails they send may be reviewed if they pass through a corporate email system - common perception is more worried about nebulous, undefined 'hackers' than it is about the fully authorised, properly empowered mail administrator.

Like many other products, such as MIMEsweeper, MailMarshal inserts itself into the data stream between your company's mail system and the outside world. Any mail messages or data travelling to your ISP must be diverted via MailMarshal so that they can be unpacked, examined, subjected to a list of rules and then put away again if all is well. This implies a number of basic technical facts: you can't expect MailMarshal to work well for you if all you have is one server doing all your work (file serving, proxy serving, Internet connection sharing, mail server hosting, Web hosting and so on), because it likes to insert itself in that data stream as a TCP/IP host, distinctly and separately addressable from inside your LAN and as part of your ISP link. NT Small Business Edition users will have a bit of a shock coming if they try to use this system.

The server on which MailMarshal runs needs to be suitably powerful. Not only might it be expected to run the DUN link to the ISP (which MailMarshal will support), but it also has to operate on all your mail messages fast enough not to insert a massive delay in mail transmission.

Inserting this system into a running live mail feed by following the instructions in the manual could be fraught. MailMarshal advises that you alter your DNS MX records to point mail streams towards the new MailMarshal server. If your MX record is the subject of non-relayed targeting by very distant counterparties, be prepared for a few days of missing mails while the MX propagates to their DNS.

That last point is a classic messaging 'gotcha', but there are other gotchas lying in wait. As predicted in PC Pro over a year ago, MailMarshal is one of a raft of server-centric products which has been built with the Microsoft-approved and suggested toolkit for such endeavours. The Microsoft Management Console (MMC) and SQL Server 7 feature heavily in the setup. The MMC is your approved way of getting to the control interface for the software, and SQL 7 is the approved way for the software to store things. In this case, SQL 7 looks after MailMarshal's log files - and every piece of traffic can be

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logged. You can configure MailMarshal and watch what it does from a remote machine running 95, 98, or NT, or look at it on its own server. You can also set MailMarshal to keep its logs on a SQL server, which is located elsewhere on your network, rather than the MailMarshal machine. This is a step forward from several other products I've seen lately using this MMC/SQL 7 service combination, and very wise as an option. SQL is a big and sometimes scary system, and there's no guarantee that selecting all the defaults - or treating it as an invisible support layer no worse than mfc42.dll - will be a sensible way to proceed.

Installing MailMarshal on an NT 4 server is laborious. It likes to have IE 5 installed (which is supplied) and there are several reboots along the way. One failed to happen, on a completely clean Compaq ProLiant 1850 dual-550MHz with NT 4 and Service Pack 6a, requiring a power down, but after that there seemed to be no problem. That was until I came to feed in the serial number - MailMarshal installs in demo mode only until you've made contact via www.marshalsoftware.com, or emailed support, so it knows you're at work on its stuff. The sticker on the software has a 'best before end' date, so you can't even install the demo unless you move fast on receiving the software. This seems to me short-sighted and typical of this market sector.

Once I got the serial number, things improved a little. It was very nice to see as much support for Lotus Notes as for Microsoft Exchange, and direct support for Notes 5, which is famously different in wide-area mail routing from previous versions. However, it would be unwise to trial a system like this on a live mail feed with high volumes of data shooting through all the time, so I can't readily advise on rates of speed, or proof against load-related crashes.

However, the integrated POP3 server (for companies with 'just Outlook' running) is a plus, and the facilities for appending automatic disclaimer signatures are slick and well thought out. The reporting package, while cumbersome, due to the reliance on SQL 7, is exhaustive, allowing mail admins to produce 'billing' data, assuming that a charging basis for email use by volume has been dreamed up. There's a typically coy series of dialogs that permit the construction of 'censor scripts' - combinations of words to look for in mail, which should trigger an alarm or prevent unsolicited bulk emails from turning up in naive users' inboxes. Only in one dialog screen-snap can you just discern 'kid and drug near sex or SEX' as an example. To my mind, it's a bit mean to open this Pandora's box of issues for the mail administrator without rather more in the way of pre-built example filters. Staying ahead of bulk-mailers, and thinking up possible search strategies for trapping morally dubious or commercially sensitive content, isn't a trivial task.

MailMarshal is a heavyweight product, with heavyweight requirements for operation. It's a worthy competitor for the MIMEsweeper market share and it certainly does better than the offering I reviewed recently, which scanned attachments for viruses only after you hacked the Registry on the server. Be in no doubt, however, this is a serious tool that won't slip into place easily in an afternoon's fiddling about.