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I tested a shipping version of InBusiness eMail Station and was impressed by its ability to manage mailing lists, e-mail accounts and aliases, while simultaneously providing IP connectivity for multiple machines via NAT (network address translation).

The eMail Station includes an Ethernet port, a serial port for supporting a single analog or ISDN modem, and external status lights. It also sports status indicators and an internal hard drive with more than 2 GB of storage for e-mail messages. The product supports both SMTP and POP3 and handles dynamic or static IP addressing from the ISP, as well as a DHCP-served private IP address. Unfortunately, the eMail Station does not support IMAP.

Putting It All Together The eMail Station is part of Intel's InBusiness network appliance product line. While the eMail Station serves primarily as an e-mail administration tool, it also handles IP connectivity for workgroups. I tested its e-mail features by choosing to connect via a LAN gateway. If you choose to use the product for your IP connectivity, you can autodetect or manually configure an external analog or ISDN (up to 128-Kbps) modem. The product's interface is an easy-to-navigate set of Java applets accessible through Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer 4.0 or Netscape Communications Corp.'s Navigator 4.0.

The eMail Station provides several ways to manage local e-mail accounts, along with the ability to consolidate e-mail from multiple accounts and different ISPs. Most ISPs bounce e-mail addressed to unknown users at a given domain to a "master" account at that domain. The eMail Station uses this approach by retrieving all e-mail from the master account and sorting it locally by user name. This feature lets a small business automatically route e-mail that would otherwise be dumped into a single account. The eMail station also can act as an SMTP server, letting small businesses manage routing both locally and over the Internet. It can query secondary ISP accounts on a per-user basis, as well as provide local e-mail accounts for interoffice communication.

The eMail Station effortlessly controls some of the more complicated features of traditional ISP-managed e-mail. Customarily, each workstation would require a modem and a line, as well as an individual e-mail account with an ISP. By using the eMail Station and a LAN, only the eMail Station needs to be configured with a modem, and only one account with an ISP is necessary. The eMail Station makes it easier to create Internet-accessible aliases by maintaining its own list and parsing them out locally--provided your ISP is configured to store all e-mail for your domain that has unrecognized user names in the master account.

It also fosters simple management of local accounts. The creation and administration of mailing lists, e-mail aliases and autoreply features was straightforward during testing, thanks to this product. You can configure the eMail Station as your gateway, a DHCP server, an internal DNS server or any combination of the three.

With a reasonable price of $875, the eMail Station arrives ready to set up and begin managing accounts via a POP3 account with an ISP, or to configure as an SMTP server. You'll need an external serial analog modem ISDN TA, or a LAN gateway if you want it to handle mail but not Internet access. The eMail Station can support up to 200 accounts and is compatible with most POP3/SMTP-compatible applications.

Preconfigured for Convenience? I connected the eMail Station to an Ethernet hub located on an Internet-connected network. After setting up clients, I tried to access the eMail Station with a Netscape 4.5 browser, but because DHCP was not enabled by default and I had configured the eMail Station to use a LAN gateway, I encountered routing problems. The default configuration is constructed to allow users to connect to the Internet simply by plugging in the product and pointing to their ISP. I changed the addressing scheme on our router and did not encounter any additional routing problems.

After navigating through the setup wizard and setting up several e-mail accounts, I was sending and receiving e-mail via the eMail Station with alacrity. I used our domain's primary e-mail account as the master POP account. The product's e-mail aliasing feature was also a snap to set up and worked flawlessly. Mail delivery and retrieval can be scheduled for specific days and during specific hours, with a granularity of one-minute intervals. Mail sent via the eMail Station in between delivery times--or retrieved from the ISP and waiting for local delivery--is cached on its 2.1-GB hard drive.

With the eMail Station's automatic account creation, new users simply point their incoming and outgoing mail servers at the eMail Station, and it automatically creates a new account for them based on defaults set by the administrator. This is a potential bottleneck, as well as a small security risk; user names can be misspelled or received e-mail can include non-users, causing excessive numbers of unused accounts.

Lori MacVittie is a senior systems engineer with Application Software Technologies. Send your comments on this article to her at lori@nandgate.com.