Any reviews on SmarterTools' SmarterMail?

IPswitch just sent me a reminder asking if I wanted to renew my service contract for IMail, and truth be told, I'm not really that satisfied with it. The Web interface isn't great, it's expensive, and frankly the spam filtering isn't as good as I suspect it could be.

Has anyone used SmarterTools' SmarterMail? I downloaded the free version to play around with here, and what I see I like. It certainly impresses me that it's a .NET product. My former host CrystalTech uses it, and I have a lot of respect for what they do in terms of Windows hosting. I'm particularly interested in how good the spam filtering is. It does DNS blacklists, which is good, so the real question now is how good the other filtering functions are.

Comments appreciated! For $200, it looks like a good deal.

18 Comments

  • Well, our small hosting operation (around 60 domains, half as many subdomains) uses SmarterMail. IT ROCKS. The new v2 web interface is NICE, it is fast, has baynesian filtering, web services to configure it (which ourc control panel uses). All in all - a marvelous little gem.

  • I've been very happy with it too. My site is currently hosted at CrystalTech and so I have access to SmarterMail for my webmail interface, and have pretty much gotten to the point where it's just about all I use for mail, and I really like it. As Thomas mentioned, they did a really nice job with the UI in the latest version, and the spam filtering I would rate about a 6.5 or 7.0 out of 10. It catches a good majority of spam, there's still quite a bit that actually manages to get through. Not any worse than any others out there though. If I had to select a mail server software for myself, I'd definitely go with it, especially for that price, it's pretty reasonable for the feature set you get with it.

  • Well, what the heck, I took the plunge. Wow... importer from IMail was seamless. So far so good, and I'm impressed with the filtering. I like that you can mark a message as spam and it will evenutally reindex the filters based on messages you've marked as spam. Nice.

  • As you can tell this is an old blog post. However, Smarter Tools Email Server is now upto version 4 and is still a pretty nice email server, however, the cost have sky rocked, and just try getting from the company! The support prices are outrageous and their stupid installer CAN NOT handle doing an upgrade from one version to another. SM's solution? Backup your data, shutdown on the services, uninstall the old version, restart, install the new version, copy your data back and cross your figures and hope for the best!

    What a JOKE! I am would NOT recommend Smarter Tools to anyone!

  • Hi,

    From a user's perspective this is one of the worst email programs i have ever seen. We nearly left our (otherwise excellent) hosting company because of it.

    All the spam filters in the world mean little when it cannot send capacity warnings and we lose important emails! (more on this towards the end)

    In general the user interface looks kind of pretty, until you actually need to use it. Someone seems to have decided that placing the save button in any of the usual places was a bad idea and therefore placed it far from where anyone expects to see it. (see if you can find it...) Additionally, the button is grey, on a grey background with grey text which means your best bet is to use Ctrl+F too look for Save. No joke!

    The worst bit is that according to our webhosts SmarterMail does not and can not send out the usual (and expected) warning messages when you are near your limit. So, if you use Thunderbird or Outlook to get your messages rather than logging in through the web interface then the only way you will know is the following abrupt message:
    "The size limit of 200 MB for mailbox 'user@domain.com' has been exceeded. Incoming mail is currently being rejected."

    The lack of the expected warning meant that we lost several important client emails and they received similarly rude messages...

    Our apologetic host suggested that we log in and check our our quota from time to time, which is simply rubbish.

    If my carppy old uni email account can warn people when they are getting close to the limit then why can't the so-called SmarterMail?

    --

    K

  • SmarterMail notifies customers before they exceed their mailbox usage and also has an Event system which allows the system administrator or domain administrator to define additional notifications or hundreds of other types of notifications.

    Regarding install and uninstalling for an upgrade? All you do is install their upgrade, and I have never even backed up my server beforehand. Their always backwards compatible so if a new version doesn't run, I could just roll back. (Hasn’t happened though).

    I have to manage 20,000 domains, and this product is unbelievable!

  • More than three year old post, man. :)

    I used it for a couple of years, then moved on to Google Apps because the spam detection sucked.

  • It’s not a SPAM solution, it’s a mail server with some integrated SPAM blocking; including the popular spam assassin which can also be load balanced for larger installations. As a hosting provider, the spam tools are there for me to use with no additional costs or I can integrate with leading spam vendors like Barracuda. Hey, as a hosting company I provide a solution so you don't need to go to Google Apps and share all your personal information. Yes, their services are pretty good but the lack of privacy is a huge issue. Anyway, I don't want to turn this into a Google Apps / Private Hosting company issue, just wanted to respond to some inaccurate posts about SmarterMail. You might want to take a look at a recent version, its turning into an Exchange Server replacement. Not sure if I can’t provide a link to my hosting company without this post being marked as spam.

  • Oh please, spam is part of the solution, and it's either there or it's not. And the lack of privacy on Google Apps is a figment of your imagination.

    SmarterMail sucks. I'll not go back to it.

  • You seem more like a competitor to SmarterMail more than a consumer. I haven't debated someone like this before, but everything you have posted is inaccurate. The owner of this blog might want to re-evaluate your posts. It has an installer / uninstaller (geez it uses Installshield), it notifies customers of overages, it includes Greylisting, Spam Assasin and a bunch other major SPAM technologies that allow me to provide 98% spam blocking for my clients without purchasing any other software / hardware. Like I said, I manage 20,000 domains and use their unlimited version for $1,199 and put 2,500 domains per server. That pretty DAMN cheap, and then my Dedicated Customers use SmarterMail 50 Domain versions for $299. If you’re a competitor walk away from this, if your consumer, hopefully I educated you a bit more on this. You got me acting like an advocate for the company, but I'm just a consumer who appreciates the quality and price of the product so I can compete against services like Windows Live and Google Apps. It’s the advantages SmarterMail has like PocketPC , SmartPhone, Outlook synchronization (for no additional costs), that is allowing me to grow my hosting company.

  • What's inaccurate? That I think it sucks? I don't compete with it. I have no desire to build a mail server! How the hell did you arrive at that conclusion?

    The spam blocking blows, in my experience. If you feel otherwise, good for you. You aren't educating me. That's being a pompous ass. Good for you and your hosting business. Don't care. The truth of the matter is that it's a hosted world, baby, and if I can not have to feed and care for a mail server, I'm not going to.

    And Google Apps is free. And it can search through my 15 years of e-mail instantly. Thanks for playing, but I have on interest in ever buying another mail server.

  • Smartermail 4 customer and was searching for reviews on the new Smartermail 5. This the first link google gives for smartermail review. can't talk about old versions back in 2004, but Smartermail 4 is awesome and i'm looking to go in version 5. Prices have increased over the years but marginally. Hoping and looking to see if smartermail 5 is as stable as 4. Any new posts would be appreciated.

  • We are currently evaluating version 5 and so far we have two complaints. The first is minor compared to the second.

    1) It looks like a lot of spam is getting through compared with our Hosting.com email servers and ...

    2) This is MAJOR. Mail is being delivered to the wrong person occasionally. We cannot explain why but we randomly get the wrong email delivered to another user's mailbox.

    Other than these two things, the product looks it could have a lot of potential. We are placing a call with support today in order to determine if there are any configuration changes we need to make. These issues may be non-issues afterwards.

  • We use smartermail enterprise version and it's the worst thing I've ever seen. As Mark said in the last post, our installation has sent emails to the wrong person too. In one message it duplicated the recipients and the attachment. One use reports that when deleting his emails from Outlook they vanish without going to the Deleted Items folder. Maybe this is a good product when used with a web broweser, but it you use Outlook..stay away from it.

  • I know that this post has long legs and goes all the way back a few years and versions. I thought that I would take the opporunity to update you all.

    SmarterMail 6.x has entered full BETA:
    http://www.smartertools.com/landing/upcomingproducts/smartermail6.aspx

    SmarterMail still gets 97 to 98% spam blocking out fo the box, but Version 6.x will have the option to add Commtouch premium spam protection. You can read about this decision here:
    http://www.smartertools.com/blog/archive/2009/07/10/taking-email-to-five-nines-spam-protection-why-commtouch-with-smartermail.aspx

    Thanks to all for reading. Be well,
    Jeff Hardy
    SmarterTools

  • Jeff, interesting that you just posted 2 days ago, I guess Google is keeping this blog post relevant. I'm here doing research on Exchange replacements for our small business.

    We absolutely need multi-user calendering features, tasks, and Outlook 2003+ integration. However, webmail is equally important to the fat client in our clinic. OWA is nice, but is IE only if you want it to work well. Given those minimum requirements, I have been pleased that there are a few options that provide reasonable migration from Exchange.

    I would guess many people looking for a way out of Exchange would appreciate a feature comparison on the SmarterMail site regarding Zimbra and Zarafa, too.

    I realize they are Linux products (and perhaps have a somewhat different feature focus), but in the age of VMs and VM appliances that shouldn't preclude a comparison.

    The SmarterMail product beats them on price point and doesn't have a subscription model, but I will need to setup all three servers in VMs and manually chart the feature results/quality. Maybe I'll post about it somewhere.

    Also, your free edition will really let me evaluate the product on my own timetable, while for the other two, I will have to apply for time limited trial licenses to evaluate the featureset and functionality.

    Thanks, hope this helps someone.

  • We are using SmarterMail now but we are experiencing missing emails after upgrade to 6.x. Sometimes, we can receive the emails, sometimes we cannot even we know the emails are sent to our mail server. Our web host is not able to find the reasons.

    It is more beautiful then old version 3.x. But it causes too much headache now. We are searching the internet and trying to find the solution now.

  • Which webhosts are using SmarterMail as webmail?

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