Burrotech Office Mail 1.1

There are the odd occasions in this line of work when I'm presented with a Victor Meldrew review - an application that causes me to exclaim 'I don't believe it'. Office Mail from Burrotech is one such example.

This program is so simple to install and configure that a novice could have it running in less than ten minutes, yet it still offers an amazing amount of power. Just look at the features on offer. It's not only a simple mail server/gateway to collect and deliver external POP3 and SMTP mail, but also provides intelligent routing to unlimited internal mail accounts on your LAN. And that's just scraping the surface. Office Mail also features anti-virus protection, collection scheduling, copying and forwarding of mail and autoresponder services.

Impressed? You should be, but I still haven't got to the real Meldrew moment. What if a licence for unlimited users was available free of charge? Yep, you don't believe it, but it's true. Burrotech is even happy for you to download it, try it and continue using it for free, with no nag screens or time limits. You just have to put up with a two-line advertising signature on every message and do without the ability to leave messages on the POP server. Of course, Burrotech would prefer you pay for a licence, but this only costs £35 and still caters for unlimited seats. It also removes the advertising, enables custom footers and throws in full technical support.

So what do you get for your money - or even for nothing? The answer is a very competent, if somewhat basic, mail server. Let's get this straight: Office Mail isn't aimed at the enterprise customer, nor does it aspire to replace Microsoft Exchange, or even the likes of MDaemon (see p170). Office Mail is firmly aimed at small businesses, home users and education - the sort of people looking for a basic email distribution and management solution for a small LAN, which works effectively with existing client software such as Outlook.

Aliases are put to very good use, and they enable one POP account to be shared by an entire office. What's more, the lack of any licence fee implications for multiple users makes this cost effective as well as efficient. Sure, it's a simple approach, which means you don't get such things as IMAP support or ODBC, but that's the point - this keeps it simple. By removing the complexity, Burrotech has stripped out the high cost factor and the configuration nightmare that puts off the target audience from even attempting a DIY mail server installation.

But that doesn't mean it won't work - it does, and it does it well without any great resource overhead. You can run Office Mail quite happily from the taskbar on any old PC, and it doesn't demand a dedicated workstation either. In this broadband age, the ability to run an email server is being made available to an increasing number of users who couldn't afford it even a year or two ago. Plus, costs aside, the sheer complexity of the applications previously ensured that installation and configuration remained in the realm of the (expensive) specialist. Office Mail, however, blows up both these barriers in one fell swoop.

Author: Davey Winder