Why we left Imail and Migrated to Merak Mail Server
(Note: this observation is intented to help people who may be considering making the switch from Rockliffe or Imail to Meral Mail Server.)
It is hard to know where to begin:
We are a small ISP (550 domains, about 1800 mail accounts). In 2000 we got started with Rockliffe Mailsite. It was a very sound product. But a about a year later, we noticed updates came less and less frequently. Finally updates became all but non-existent. Then in 2003 we bought out another hosting company that used Imail. To make the transition easier, we adopted Imail and had every intention to migrate all of our Rockliffe accounts to it.
But the more we worked with Imail, the more we noticed small problems / inconsistencies in the product. The biggest problem we had with it was that in order to use database mailboxes, we had to put each domain in its own table. When we called their support and asked how we could put all email accounts in one table, they said it couldn’t be done ... and they had never heard anyone ask for such a thing! I was blown away. As an ISP, there are about 100 reasons I can come up with why we should have one complete list of all email accounts stored nice and neatly in one table.
Then came their AV solution (F-secure) I don’t know if you were using Imail back then, but the implementation was a piece of junk. There was no way to see what F-secure was doing, no logs, nothing; just this bizarre small interface that would show you the date of the last update. What became obvious to me is that they found the easiest product to license with Imail and did the smallest amount of work to integrate the two. Everyone I knew on the list back then used Declude instead.
This is probably much more info than you wanted, but by now, I consider myself a connoisseur of mail programs (from an ISP’s perspective at least). And from the first time I worked with Merak I immediately noticed how well thought out the product was. Every feature from SMTP security, logging, ODBC authentication, AV, AntiSpam, etc was written by hand, not ‘bundeled’ like Imail. AV is the exception, they use avast as the engine, but the integration is seamless.
Here is an example of what a great product Merak is. Out of the box it stores its email account info in a flat file. After a few weeks of playing with it, I decided to try its ODBC features. Once you setup the ODBC datasource, Merak asked “Do you want me to migrate all existing mailboxes from the flat file to the database” I said Yes and a few seconds later, all of my accounts were in the database. With Rockliffe or Imail that would have been a delete and re-enter process for sure.
The product is fast, stable and well supported. Best of all, Merak is keeping up with email security issues (it already handles SPF, Domain Keys, Tarpitting and Grey Listing) I today’s hostile email world, you need someone that keeping you ahead of the spammers. Does Imail even support SPF yet? It didn’t 8 months ago when we decided to leave.
Imails crazy pricing changes were the last straw. They made the decision very easy for us to leave.