FEATURES

Big , Bad E-mail

For SMTP processing, Missive uses the standard Unix (pre-Extended SMTP) Sendmail program. Although this lets Wingra establish Missive's SMTP support quickly, using Sendmail as part of an e-mail backbone is asking for trouble, particularly in a product that terms itself "Internet centric." That's because one of the functions of a properly functioning e-mail backbone is to act as an application proxy firewall; Sendmail has proven again and again that it is incapable of operating reliably and safely in this area. More important, Sendmail's operation is not integrated into Missive's, so any loss or problem inside the Sendmail part of the system can ea sily go undetected and unlogged.

Missive covers many basic features well--including translation of messages between different formats, logging messages as they pass through the system, looking up users in directories and converting from one message format to another--and can easily meet the needs of simple, low-volume e-mail systems. At the high end, though, Missive is hampered by some big holes in functionality. For example, Missive offers no documented application programming interface (API), so if the base product doesn't do what you want, you've got to do without--or hire Wingra to edit its own source code and build you a special version.

Other basic features necessary in an Internet environment--such as handling Internet mail separately from internal e-mail--are similarly absent in the basic Missive package. In our test, we wanted to delete references to internal machines from message headers, and rewrite addresses in headers to hide inside information. We could do neither.

Missive led us beautifully as far as it could--and then threw us hard into a brick wall. For example, if we wanted to vary some aspects of our Microsoft Mail gateway configuration using the GUI, it was just a point-and-click away. But for other aspects, such as changing the format of addresses, we had to delete the entire Microsoft Mail gateway, which took with it all the Microsoft Mail users in the X.500 directory. Similarly, specifying per-user conversion of Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) types was a snap. But when we wanted Missive to hunt down and fix errant cc:Mail attachments caused by IBM's faulty gateway (a problem any e-mail manager might encounter when linking to the Internet), there was no prayer of even starting.

It was a common refrain throughout our Missive testing: If Missive said it could do something, there were no problems. But if Missive doesn't support a certain function, there's simply no way around it--you can't get there from here. The almost total lack of hard-copy documentation didn' t help, either. While Missive includes a good planning and installation guide, day-to-day operational information is available online and nowhere else.

Advanced Features and Security Missive's relatively sparse feature set left us little to look at in the advanced-features part of our lab test. Wingra provides both HTML-based and mail-based directory query services, which let users search the directory without knowing much about X.500's complexity. Most of the information in the X.500 database related to message delivery is unchangeable by unprivileged users, although Wingra does include a way for users to change their passwords using a browser.

Wingra emphasizes backbone operations, preferring to leave end-user support to the packages they integrate. To run a Post Office Protocol (POP) or Internet Mail Access Protocol (IMAP) store, you'll need to turn to native Unix utilities or add a separate system. Security receives little attention in Missive. Wingra is working on the proposed standard for SMTP authentication, but most TCP/IP security features will have to come from standard Unix add-ons, such as TCP wrappers.

Management Network management is primarily based on the Missive GUI, which runs over X and is used for monitoring, control and configuration (see screen shot above right). For installation and basic configuration, Missive's GUI made things easy.

Monitoring and advanced configuration, though, are not well thought-out, and this represents our major concern with Missive. The GUI, in this area, is more hindrance than help. The user interface is a key piece in the ease-of-use strategy for Missive, but has a long way to go. For example, when we wanted to look at the status of the message channels, we could do so only by looking at each queue individually. Similarly, when we wanted to look at log files, Missive presented them to us broken up by channel and by day, without any way in the GUI to pull out information across days or across channels.