SmarterMail for Windows

User Reviews

• Abysmal....the worst email I have ever used

  Rick_NielsonOctober 2, 2013

  Pros

  None. A thorough disappointment.

  Cons

  Clunky, prone to abrupt settings changes, super-slow loading time for messages. Avoid.

  Summary

  If I didn't have to use this for work I would delete every trace of it.

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• Very solid and robust email solution

  kaylusAugust 19, 2013

  Pros

  * Incredible level of configuration granularity through GUI * The web front/back-ends are in .NET but incredibly responsive and optimized. * SPAM detection internally can be fine-tuned for any situation. They have their "paid" solution, but it is somewhat unnecessary given how well the internal one works when configured. * EXCHANGE support! Outlook 2013 uses Exchange Active Sync, this supports it very well -- all of our clients from Outlook to Androids and iPhones are working. * Shared Calendars, Tasks, Contacts with Read, Read/Write, Full Control capabilities. By using "Sharepoint" type data connections, this is fully operational with Outlook. * Secure file storage and transfer, with expiry date and password. * Full skinning capability. * Heavily detailed reporting on almost any aspect of the system with custom report generation. * Sarbanes-Oxley compliance through full message archiving. * LDAP support allows your users to continue using their domain password. * Amazing support.

  Cons

  * Limited LDAP support, they recently added in Anonymous LDAP query so you can set the mailserver up in different configurations besides the norm. * Limited EAS policy support, at the moment it only supports remote wiping of devices, and this seems spotty at best.

  Summary

  One of my previous jobs included administration of a 20,000 user Exchange environment, and many of my previous jobs have been at the Enterprise level supporting environments up to 300,000 users. Moving to a smaller environment was a bit of a change for me, but let me expand my horizons in looking for flexible solutions that did not break the budget but provided the experience that one would expect from higher level products. In researching a mail solution I tested Kerio, Zimbra, Atmail, OX, and a few others. Many of these had some severe limitations for discriminating users, ranging from ugly webmail interfaces to cumbersome maintainability. Others, like Atmail, refused to support me due to my size citing financial reasons while glaringly ignoring major flaws in their software. SmarterMail was one of the first tested and disregarded at first due to the fact that we were looking at utilizing a custom linux environment. Needless to say after we sorted through the list finding bugs, cringe-worthy GUIs, shoddy support, undocumented requirements, and sometimes vague or misleading instructions we were about to give up and go the hosted Exchange route. Luckily the VM running our SmarterMail test was still up, if expired, and the SmarterMail team extended our license to test even longer. Contrary to one of the previous posters, we never had issues with our mail server being remotely disabled or running a development environment. After moving to a production staging we noted a show-stopping bug with the LDAP, but we weren't to be deterred so we used a support ticket (at cost) to report the issue. The agent assigned to us (Bryon Grosz) went out of his way to research the issue, building custom releases for us to test while we discovered where the problem was. Not only that, due to the nature of the incident the support ticket was refunded. Not only that, the next release included my fixes so that I had no worry about upgrade paths. We've been live for a short while now and the only 'headache' for us was a carry-over from our previous hosted environment of SPAM, and with the robust SPAM configurations we've already knocked it down 80% and plan to have SPAM almost eliminated by next week. (It could be faster, but we all know email customers get quite upset if valid email gets gobbled). - SmarterMail Enterprise User Kevin Morgan

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• SmarterMail Rocks

  houston77mrApril 12, 2013

  Pros

  Excellent spam filtering. Since switching over to smartermail I have cut down spam to less than 1% of what it was. And to be able to administer multiple domains from the same server is way over the top compared to other email servers.

  Cons

  Webmail isn't working in Opera or IE. Version 11.0 It worked fine in those browsers in Other versions that I used (8 thru 10)

  Summary

  Excellent Spam filtering. Great Multi-Domain support. (Easier than exchange).

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• horrible, terrible

  cvlugApril 11, 2013

  Pros

  it sends and recieves mails

  Cons

  if you buy the professional version(300$), and install smartermail on a development server as well as on a development server, it violate the license policy. They disabled smartermail on both my servers! I could not send or recieve mails on my production server, while i payed 300 $ for it. It took them days to react to my email. In my opinion, nobody is allowed to mess around one someone else his production server. For shure not, if you payed for the product. I will never ever buy something of this company.

  Summary

  The company of smatermail might disable you mailserver on your production server, even if you bought the product!

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• Buggy Software - Not even close to Enterprise quality

  myaffeeSeptember 2, 2012

  Pros

  inexpensive

  Cons

  existing features buggy claimed features completely unimplemented company support acknowledged bugs but unwilling to offer the slightest compensation, such as an extension of the service contract

  Summary

  We host about 1000 mailboxes and have used Imail, Kerio and SmarterMail. SmarterMail is by far the buggiest email server software we've ever used. After the 5th bug that we reported and they confirmed and promised to fix, I felt like we were beta testers and asked to at least have our service contract extended. Not a chance they said. Some of these bugs were not small either. Two of them were causing email to completely disappear from users boxes. The header of the message would remain in the box but the content of the message was completely gone. The company blamed it on 3rd party virus checkers running on the server. We turned those off and things got a little better but a completely different bug led to the exact same problem - gigabytes worth of emails completely being erased. We thought we had a disk problem or something serious until we were able to reproduce the issue. Even in version 10, this software is not even close to ready for prime time.

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• No problem with speed here

  raynerhowardFebruary 14, 2011

  Pros

  Fast, reliable

  Cons

  None that I've found yet

  Summary

  Not sure what it was like using version 5 or even 6. On version 7.4 now and no problems whatsoever. Looks like these guys got their act together.

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• Slow slow slow slow slow!

  clarionCallOctober 28, 2009

  Pros

  I got nothing for this category

  Cons

  This service is poorly designed and unbelievably slow. For a company that does nothing but email service, I find it to be truly pathetic.

  Summary

  Save your sanity and use some other product.

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• SmarterMail is stable and feature-rich

  jeffreyjhardyJuly 6, 2009

  Pros

  iPhone, Blackberry, and Outlook sync are great. The Webmail is the best I've seen. The Admin managemetn is Web-based too so I can manage a couple hundred domains from homeand get alerts on my phone. Solid anti-spam included without extra cost.

  Cons

  I wish that it had better mailing list features and an archiving component that was easier to access--but I have heard that both of these will be addressed in the next version of SmarterMail 6.x.

  Summary

  Really good stability and features. No real issues and the set up was pretty smooth. Planning on upgrading to 6.x when it comes out. The guys at SmarterMail know the hosting inductry so I got all those little things that make my life easier. Great price point too. My quibbles are small ones and I think that you just cannot get everything. This comes as close as I have seen so far.

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• Very Poor.

  webhost2008March 30, 2009

  Pros

  Good DomainKeys support.

  Cons

  See post below: VERY buggy. I can attest to the phantom missing messages in Outlook as well as many of my customers. I have even seen it happen in Thunderbird.

  Summary

  This is NOT an Exchange alternative as SmarterTools claims.

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• Way too buggy.

  diskdriveexpertMarch 30, 2009

  Pros

  Provides many configuration options and is fairly easy to use.

  Cons

  Inboxes are corrupted frequently. Outlook 2007 reports IMAP errors and often messages tend to disappear for several hours before delivery. I have used this product on several different webhosts as well as my own dedicated mail server.

  Summary

  Avoid.

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