SmarterMail is built to scale easily and provide complex functionality without breaking the bank.

by Jeff Goldman [November 24, 2004]

SmarterTools was founded in 2002 with the aim of improving upon the scalability and functionality of other e-mail solutions that were then available. "The existing products at the time were really focused for small businesses—the high cost, high value market of five years ago," says Steve Roth, the company's Sales and Marketing Manager.

The company's e-mail offering, SmarterMail, is built on the .NET framework, which Roth says allows the company to come to market quickly with new and complex features—one of which is the webmail client. "It's not a simplistic webmail interface that just interacts via POP or IMAP with our mail server," he says.

SmarterMail 877-35-SMART sales@smartertools.com

Instead, the webmail client is directly integrated with the mail server. "That allows us to offer more advanced features, so that when we move messages around, we're not limited by the IMAP protocol," Roth says. "It can also act in a multi-threaded manner, so we're able to do a lot of tasks at the same time, providing more information—and just providing a better experience altogether."

The trade-off is that the webmail client only works with SmarterMail, not with other MTAs. "We didn't dumb it down so we could sell it separately," Roth says. "It communicates directly with the server. We're multilingual, and it supports every single language available, with spell checking in ten languages—we automatically detect the language they're using when they come in."

Web-based functionality
For the administrator, all interfaces are Web-based as well. "It's completely Web-based for the system admin as well as the user—and the same is true of all our applications," Roth says. "So you can do anything you want from anywhere at any time."

The product is also easily scalable, allowing SmarterTools to support some of the larger providers in the industry. "SmarterMail can grow to support installations of tens of thousands of domains," Roth says. "We have some clients that have a quarter million to a half million mailboxes on one server."

SmarterMail also provides the ISP with a wide range of statistical information. "You can see exactly how many messages sent, how many bytes sent, how many messages received, how many bytes received, that any mailbox and/or domain is doing," Roth says. "We also have tools within SmarterMail that monitor the queue and can notify the system administrator if a message is being sent more often than it should be."

The application can be set up to work directly with Trend Micro ServerProtect, and can be integrated with other virus scanners as well. "We allow the system administrator to control how long messages sit in the spool, allowing really any virus program to be integrated—in addition to spam tools," Roth says.

The product also provides spam filtering that can be controlled directly through the webmail client. "There's many different techniques that you can use in SmarterMail to block spam, including spam lists, Bayesian filtering, reverse DNS lookup—and we're working on SPF and Sender ID protocols," Roth says. "You can control how strict you want to be, or how loose you want to be, from the webmail interface."

Statistics and stability
SmarterMail costs $499 for an unlimited number of domains and users, and a free trial version is available for download from the company's Web site. Other products offered by SmarterTools include a statistical package and a ticket system.

Derek Curtis is Director of Sales and Marketing for CrystalTech Web Hosting. Last year, Curtis says, CrystalTech switched to SmarterMail. "It was a lot better than what we were using," he says. "It seemed to be able to handle the load a lot better, and it was much better from a management standpoint."

The stats available within SmarterMail, Curtis says, were a strong selling point for the company. "It was really about the ability to have access to queue information and disk space from within the mail application itself, versus having to get a third party product to incorporate into it," he says. "The stability of the application, and the price, were considerations as well—it's considerably less expensive than what we were using in the past."

And the company itself, he adds, has been easy to work with. "They're doing pretty well in terms of their growth and the number of customers they're picking up, but they've never dropped the ball in terms of getting a solution for an issue that we've seen, or even suggestions on how to improve the product," Roth says. "They're always open to that type of interaction, which I think is rare from a software company—especially a software company that's building such a mission-critical application."

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Online resource:
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