N-Plex Global's administrator WUI is less glamorous than NTMail's. However, its Java-based utilities, such as the Personal and Group Account Managers (PAM/GAM), allow Web-based management of individual and group accounts. As with QUALCOMM's Eudora WorldMail and Rockliffe's MailSite, we were able to install the GUI management on multiple machines and manage the MailSite server over the network. But we were disappointed that there were no batch user utilities to add users or import from an existing user database. To make matters worse, if users are added before the Web/LDAP gateway and directory are installed, those users will not have entries within the directory after it is installed.

On a more positive note, mailing lists were a snap to set up and manage using the GUI utility. Built-in service monitoring utilities can be used to watch SMTP, IMAP and POP3 transactions. Using a schedule, we created a monitor that watched incoming SMTP traffic and reported its findings every two minutes. We were then able to export the report to a .csv file and view it from within Microsoft Excel. Although we found these tools handy, it took a little more digging around than we expected to make them work. Via the GUI you can also monitor real-time statistics--including most of the system tick counters--every 10 seconds. N-Plex Global and Eudora were the only two servers to support toggles for the EXPN and VRFY SMTP commands. During testing we disabled both of these commands and hid members of mailing lists and mail users.

Stalker Software CommuniGate Pro
Like NTMail, CommuniGate Pro relies solely on a WUI for management and configuration information. Although its WUI is better than that of Vintra Mail Server Pro, it falls short of NTMail's interface, which is much more well-organized and easier to navigate. CommuniGate Pro's SMTP security options also include antispam features, such as RBL support, and inbound and outbound message filters. Management features include individual message and message store restrictions per user and domain, as well as account redirection and mirroring. But CommuniGate Pro falls far short of that of our leaders with some conspicuously absent features, including basic directory services and address book support. It also lacks flexible database options. With its admirable breadth of platform support, CommuniGate Pro may find its way into your network on Mac OS, Linux and Solaris. In fact, we installed CommuniGate Pro on a Macintosh G3 server that will be part of a forthcoming Network Computing review.

Using the serverwide automated processing feature, we were able to set rules and policies for incoming mail. Because we've had problems with messages from aol.com addresses in the past, we created a rule that redirected all aol.com messages to a specific address. Rules are based on search strings found in one or more headers. To test this feature, we created a mail filter to redirect spam mail to a spam folder. CommuniGate Pro allowed us to create multiple triggers based on numerous e-mail addresses. These can include redirecting the message to a different account, automatically replying to it or modifying the header to include extra information.

Unfortunately, our testing showed CommuniGate Pro's WUI to be bulky and difficult to use. When connected as administrator there are no conventions to log out and log back in as a user. But CommuniGate Pro does have different access privileges for various aspects of the mail server. Overall, CommuniGate Pro needs a more refined Web interface and more feature-rich user and system options, including support for user databases and basic directory services. With these improvements, CommuniGate Pro could conceivably step up and compete with IMail and NTMail.