Office Mail

My by line reads that "maybe even a few reviews" - well here's one for you.

Office Mail by Burrotech - as far as I can work out, this is a one man band but for my pennies - he gets 100% for effort and 100% for support and 100% for a top product.

In my current role I deal with a disparate bunch of folks who need to have in house email, if not external, for teaching purposes more than anything else. I personally also have a need for a small mail server application so that my eldest can send and receive eMails BUT not access the web without supervision and even then allowing him free access to eMail might be unwise. Anyway, one of my colleagues came across this app and mentioned how the author responded to requests and support emails, so I thought why not give it a go.

So I've been testing it - at home but mainly at work - for the best part of a month or more. It is very easy to setup and if you follow the basic introduction you will be up and running in no time at all. Some of its benefits are:

• can be internal mail only
• can be external only
• can be a mixture of both
• does webmail - though not attachments yet
• has a built-in spam thrasher
• allows each user to be linked to their own individual POP3 account
• limited to one smtp account - and here I recommend an Authenticated SMTP service.
• plus much more ....
• allows you to use any mail app you like
• POP and SMTP ports are easily changed to avoid conflicts and relay issues
  

Anyway - I've got it working at work with no problems. I set up an Authenticated SMTP account for testing as my current ISP has "been considering just such since 2001" and it is still on their maybe list and none of the other accounts I have allow relaying either - quite rightly. Also, gmail might have helped except that OM doesn't yet support SSL - I say yet because "he is considering it".

Onto the support issues - well for whatever reason I could not get it to work at home for SMTP. This whether I used my ISP settings or the authenticated SMTP ones, which also allow for port changes in case of problems. So eMails on the support forum have been back and forth to the point where I can now claim to currently have the longest thread on the forum - go spot it if you dare. But, Burrotech have persevered and last night I installed the latest version, at their suggestion and lo and behold it has fixed my problems with the software. So my hat is off to Mr Burrotech and this is one piece of software I will register. At just £39 it is well worth it and allows a few extra goodies.

The best bit I think, is that as far as my eldest is concerned I can keep tabs on him. He knows this and he also knows that I won't be checking every day or even every week - but I just may drop in at anytime. OM allows me to make copies of eMails sent to a particular user and have them forwarded to a.n.other user. Also my authenticated SMTP service will forward (if I tick the box, and I did) any eMails I send via their service to an eMail address that I nominate. Which is very handy for keeping copies of emails sent whilst on the road, but it also means I can find out what my son is up to - if I need to.

Big Daddy is watching ..... hmmm.