I will now start a review on the email server software MDaemon by Alt-N Technologies. Pretty unique name for a software developer this one. I had known for a long time about this software, during the days when I started having broadband access (was about 2001 or so). Well, then I was using the err….”trial” version of MDaemon from my home to act as my email server. I think it was under another company called Deerfield or something (Editor: Got info from Alt-N that Deerfield was actually one of the resellers, not the developer). All you need back then was a Dynamic IP client (yes, it was dynamic), unlimited internet access and you can start your own email server. And it was pretty easy to setup, install the software on a Windows system, configure a domain name to point to your IP and add users and you are well on your way to become an email administrator.

Now, my company decided to setup their own in-house email server and I made use of my previous experience with MDaemon to do it. It has been years since I had used this piece of software but I was still very impressed with it. MDaemon Pro allows you to have multiple domains (or virtual domains) and it is licensed per user. For 50 users, the pro version cost US$760. You still need to pay for anti-virus and anti-spam and that’s per user too. Again for 50 users, it is US$330 yearly. And yes, it is not cheap. Especially when you compare to some Linux email solutions. For installation, it’s the same thing, just install the actual software and the Security Plus (anti-virus and anti-spam addon) on your windows system (Win2k/WinXP/Win2003).

The first thing you would realize after you have installed the software is that it has a lot of features! I mean really a lot. I have tried other email solutions (mainly Linux ones) and these email solutions do not have so many features and options for you to configure. Well, it can be confusing at first glance, but after a while, it gets easier. Anyway, if you understand how an email server works, the administrator interface is pretty well organized. Okay, the next step is to point your MX records to your server and start to add users. If you have more than 1 domain, you can configure it as well. Actually, if you are looking for a basic system, that’s all you need to do. Just make sure the FQDN for your server is correctly setup.

But of course, this review will not stop here. We have a lot of features to go through. Some of which are very useful to email administrators. The software allow bandwidth throttling (which allows you to control which service to throttle), event timers (how long a connection have to wait before giving up), archival (which creates a copy of incoming and outgoing mails from the server for your paranoid boss), forced signature (leaves a signature at the bottom of every message like saying everything is not to be blamed on the company) and so on. You really have to use this program in order to see how powerful it can be. It even allows you to have “attachment linking“, which sort of removes any attachment and replace it with an URL for your receiver to download. This can save big on bandwidth, disk space and server resource.

If you are into micro administrating, you are also in for a treat. You can assign administrators (Global or Domain) privilege to the email users. A global email administrator can control the email server and it can be configured through a web-based interface. A domain administrator can configure only users in his/her domain. This gives you the flexibility of dividing control to different “administrators”, each only to their own domain.

If you are worried about security, you will be pleased with what this software can offer you. MDaemon allows you to do content filtering (like which file attachment to reject), DNS Blacklists (for blocking spammers), Reverse Lookups (to check whether an IP address sending the mail has a domain name registered to it), SMTP authentication, POP before SMTP, SPF, DomainKeys and comes with a powerful spam filter. This powerful spam filter can be configured to use a scoring system and a variety of spam fighting techniques like Bayesian Classification.

I have run my company’s email server for about 1 month now and I didn’t find any major problem. Although the domain name is pretty new (about 6 months), it seem to have fewer spam and viruses (in fact no virus email went through) than before. I don’t have any complains about sending and receiving mails from users either. This is surely a good sign and if all goes smoothly, maybe I can get promoted to like a Director or something cool sounding and have my own parking space.

Yes, I was impressed before, I am even more impressed now. It’s true that it is expensive but if you are keen on running your own server, but think that it is not wise to spend a lot of money hiring an experienced Linux administrator purely for administrating your email server, MDaemon running on Windows system is the best solution. It’s simple to install, simple to configure and troubleshoot. I mean, anyone with some knowledge of Windows and a little on Internet and setting up servers will not have any problem with this software. I would recommend this software to small and medium businesses. But I think if you are a big company, with a hell lot of users, using Linux email servers which probably be more worth while in the long run. Not that MDaemon cannot handle the load (I think it should be able to), but the users licensing cost will be too great (plus the yearly cost of Security Plus) and it would be better to just hire an experienced linux administrator to maintain your linux server (which software can be virtually free, that includes ClamAV as well).

I am now hoping for a Linux version of MDaemon. It would be real cool to have such features embedded in a Linux email server, making all the other Linux email administrators jealous! Surely such a email server will encourage other developers to incorporate such features in their own releases too. Let’s all keep our fingers and emails cross.

And no, Alt-N did not pay me money to do this little review. My crap blog and I, we are too unimportant. If you are learning to setup an email server, please take a look at my article on setting up of an email server.