Rockliffe's MailSite software serves mail, Webmail, and WAP mail for ISPs around the world, large and small—and for Star Wars fan site theforce.net.

ISP-Planet Staff [October 22, 2001]

Rockliffe's MailSite scales from serving 10,000 subscribers to several million, and runs on clustered Windows machines. With a cluster architecture, every machine has at least one backup, so if an individual machine goes down, the cluster as a whole will not fail.

"Our philosophy is rock solid software," says John Davies, CEO and founder of Rockliffe. He says his most notable competitors, such as Openwave's intermail and SUN's iPlanet do not run on Windows, so he has an advantage in the Windows arena.

The basic MailSite cluster is made up of two servers for Microsoft SQL Server (they hold the user directory), two servers for Windows NT File Server (for storing messages), and two dataless file servers taking care of IMAP, POP, Webmail, and wireless messaging.

The management console Graphical User Interface (GUI) for MailSite (left) is designed to be self-explanatory to any Windows admin.

Incoming connections are load balanced across the servers, and to scale up, an ISP simply adds more servers.

Rockliffe's list of customers includes the Star Wars site theforce.net. "Rockliffe's MailSite answered all of our needs in one easy-to-install, easy-to-use package", said Darthcleo, Star Wars Fan and Technical Guru for TheForce.Net. "POP/SMTP, web interface for account access, web archiving for our mailing lists, and the ability to handle newsletters for 36,000 people made MailSite a perfect fit for our needs. MailSite's integration with MS SQL for the newsletter makes list management simple, and MaiISite's anti-spam and anti-relay features make it possible to control unwanted e-mail and content."

Davies is also proud of a transatlantic list of ISP clients large and small, that includes Digex, WorldCom, turk.net in Turkey, infomaniak in Switzerland. "We serve 3,000 customers with 12 million seats worldwide, of which half of those are in the U.S.," says Davies. Rockliffe is expanding into Asia, with customers or branch offices to be announced in the near future.

"Our headquarters is in Silicon Valley, "explains Davies, "but our software development is in Edinburgh [Scotland] so because our software was written in Europe, it had multilingual support early on. Our webmail supports 17 languages today, so pan-European service providers could support subscribers Europe-wide."

The company adds functionality through alliances. For very large clients, MailSite worked with Compaq to develop software that would work with Compaq's Non Stop Himilaya platform. "The Himilaya product is quite impressive," says Davies, explaining that components are hot-swappable and the system can be upgraded while it's on, making it great for service providers who are signing up lots of clients. The Himilaya server can scale linearly from two processors to 4,000 processors

More recently, Rockliffe announced an alliance with anti-virus firm F-Secure to scan e-mail attachments for viruses at the server level.

Pricing and availability
MailSite is available now, and F-Secure functionality will be in beta in early 2002. The price is $1 per user for the license, plus a subscription fee of $0.25 per year.

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