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I tested it with a variety of clients, including the latest versions of Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express and Qualcomm Eudora Pro. In last year's roundup of IMAP mail servers, NTMail earned a Network Computing Editor's Choice award (see "NTMail Outpaces Solid Pack of IMAP Mail Servers," www.networkcomputing.com/1009/1009r1.html).

Supersonic Installation
According to Gordano, NTMail running on a dual Pentium 200-MHz system with 128 MB of memory on a 2-Mbps Internet link can support thousands of users and more than 750,000 messages per day. I believe it. The initial installation of the product was so quick and streamlined that if I had blinked, I would have missed most of it. I chose the path and directory and selected which of the four products (NTMail, NTList, JUCE and Anti-Virus Scanner) to install. Then I entered the domain name and IP address that the server should use. The remainder of the configuration and registration of NTMail was done via its WUI.

NTMail version 4 emphasized Gordano's focus on creating a comprehensive WUI for mail-server configuration, maintenance and administration. Version 5 further refines the WUI by adding user- and administrator-level configuration options, such as letting users add their own e-mail aliases, and self-maintenance tasks like rebuilding users' damaged mailbox files. The user-level WUI also sports a modest Web-based e-mail client with composition, review, deletion and forwarding functions, among others. It lacks more advanced features (such as spelling correction, address books, filtering by date, sender, recipient and drag-and-drop message management).

Gordano also has given mail-server administrators a new set of automation tools by opening up the power of the scripting language behind NTMail's WUI. Gordano's MML (Mail Meta Language), a proprietary language, uses script syntax similar to C source code. MML can be used to customize the look and function of the NTMail's WUI as well as most of its internal functions as a mail server. For example, an administrator can script separate procedures for all mail sent or received, or create a script that can process an e-mail command to add or delete users. These scripted procedures can be implemented on a whole-server, per-domain or per-user basis.

Limited Load-Sharing
New in NTMail 5 is the ability to do load-sharing. When I began exploring this feature, I hoped it would let two or more mail servers synchronize their internal user databases and mail stores in a fault-tolerant, failover fashion as well as perform load-balancing. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Using administrator-set rules, NTMail lets the mail servers defined in a load-sharing array decide which server will handle the POP3 and IMAP logins, message stores and WUI sessions for a set of users. For example, mail server Mail-A-J.domain. com handles e-mail accounts that start with the letters "A" through "J." Sharing a common user database can be accomplished by using an external ODBC, SQL or LDAP server or the NT user database (LDAP authentication DLL is a beta feature and has been tested only with the LDAP server provided with Netscape Directory Server 4.1). Replication and sharing mail stores aren't as easily fulfilled and aren't offered by the load-sharing feature of NTMail 5.

To aid in a complete and timely recovery in the event of a critical system failure, NTMail's entire configuration can be loaded from a file that contains its settings and parameters, along with the user names and encrypted passwords of all e-mail accounts stored in its internal user database. What makes this even more effective is that NTMail 5 can be configured to send a zipped copy of this config file to a specified e-mail address at regular intervals, thus ensuring that the most current data is saved elsewhere.

The internal antispam features of NTMail would suffice for many installations. However, the combination of NTMail's internal antispam features and those included in JUCE (available for $495) makes for the most formidable barrier against spam, denial of service attacks and general mail-server abuse I've ever seen. Gordano should drop the separate licensing of JUCE and combine it into NTMail.

NTMail 5 also includes long-wished-for server administration features. You can delete mailbox contents older than a certain date and delete e-mail accounts that haven't been used in a given time period. NTMail 5 also offers multiple sets of quotas.

As in its previous versions, NTMail's tight integration with the NT user database, as well as NT system performance counters and NT event logs, make it an excellent fit for NT administrators seeking an Internet standards-based mail server without all the weight of bloated group/collaboration software. Its cohesive and comprehensive WUI and powerful administration and user-level features place NTMail 5 well in the lead of NT-based mail server packages. James L. Kostecki is director of Internet/intranet technologies at Gabriel Communications Group, Appleton, Wisc. Send your comments on this article to him at jamesk@gabriel.net.