Timothy
Parker Consulting Incorporated
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Stalker’s CommuniGate Pro Mail Server Stalker’s CommuniGate Pro is a Linux application designed
as a network-wide mail server. The
product has an amazing collection of supported features and abilities, making it
one of the most talented mail servers available on any platform, let alone
Linux. A quick glance through the
alphabet soup of supported protocols gives you an idea of CommuniGate Pro’s
flexibility. There’s support for
all the standard mail protocols (POP3 and IMAP4), Internet mail exchange through
SMTP and ESMTP, central directory and LDAP support, as well as antispam
features! We installed CommuniGate Pro on a RedHat Linux system for
testing. Installing CommuniGate Pro is through RPM, and the installation routine
create a bunch of other scripts that take care of routine tasks for you. As part
of the installation, CommuniGate Pro replaces standard mail handlers such as
sendmail binaries with its own versions, as well as providing startup and
shutdown scripts. The interface to CommuniGate Pro is through HTML, allowing any
Web browser to configure the software from any platform.
Remote administration is also supported through CLI and SMTP.
Using the Web interface (you don’t need to have Web server software
running in order to use the HTML interface) you can configure CommuniGate Pro
quite quickly, although the task of setting up mailboxes and aliases can take a
while for a larger company. The Web connection is protected by SSL, but for
those who dislike Web interfaces of any kind, standard ASCII editors can be used
to modify the configuration files. On-line
help is accessible through the Web interface and is quite good. Setting up a
site with 100 users and a bunch of virtual routes took a couple of hours, but
the process quickly becomes routine. Administration tasks are light because scripts handle most
of the tasks for you, including logging and log file handling. An administrator
can monitor the behavior of CommuniGate Pro, including mail transfers and
connection behavior, as well as observer the flow of mail to users. The anti-spam
measures are good, although there will always be some mail that sneaks through.
You can block mail by a number of mechanisms, including source names,
domains, or IP addresses. Administrators
can set up multiple mailboxes per user as well as shared mailboxes, and allow
multiple domains to be handled by a single installation of CommuniGate Pro. The default setup provided with CommuniGate Pro will
suffice for most installations, but you can modify practically every aspect of
the mail server and clients. You
can establish server rules that dictate who CommuniGate Pro will behave and how
it is accessed, which allows you to set policies and stick with them. You can
invoke or disable scripts for mail handling, as well as executing external
scripts (such as backup routines). The list of customizable aspects can be truly
staggering, and you can apply completely different sets based on a network-wide,
domain-specific or even user-specific approach. The default client access method for CommuniGate Pro is
through the Web, and while Web-based mail clients tend to get a lot of
complaints they are becoming more common and useful. You aren’t stuck with the
Web mail client, of course. You can
use practically any client that talks one of the protocols provided by
CommuniGate Pro. After playing with the Web interface for a few days, we were
struck by the ability to modify just about every aspect of the system: how many
mail messages appear on the screen at once, how mail is displayed, setting up
hidden and common mailboxes, and so on. If
you do use the Web interface you’re still stuck with the browser buttons for
many tasks, and there are a few quirks where the order of messages gets jumbled
up and read mail is mixed with unread, but on the whole the Web interface works
surprisingly well. We suspect most
users will be using commercial mail packages, through, and CommuniGate Pro works
well with all of them. We tried CommuniGate Pro with a 50 user license and
bombarded the system with tons of mail, including lots of bogus addresses and
stuff we would treat as spam. We
kept recycling the messages, so we put through over 1,000 pieces of mail per
hour. The CommuniGate Pro server
kept up with the load without a problem, although our mailboxes and log files
grew quite large! We had no problem
at all with the CommuniGate Pro server of Web clients, as they continued to work
throughout the one-week testing period without a crash. CommuniGate Pro is not
an inexpensive mail handler, but compared to packages like Microsoft’s
Exchange Server, it is a bargain. The
flexibility of the package is wide, but be prepared to spend a while getting it
set up properly. The software runs on a wide number of platforms, so it’s
likely there is a version for your network. CommuniGate Pro Summary: A surprisingly powerful and flexible mail server and client with tons of configurability and excellent robustness. |
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Send mail to
tparker@tpci.com with
questions or comments about this web site.
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