MailMarshal 3.2 for Windows NT

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 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.