Review: SurgeMail

SurgeMail 3.0, starting at $175/10 users
NetWin
Auckland, New Zealand
http://netwinsite.com/

SurgeMail is a cross-platform (Windows/Linux/Mac OSX/Solaris) e-mail server with quite reasonable pricing - in addition to per-user pricing that tops out at $870 for unlimited users, it's free for up to 5 users for non-commercial use without SSL or direct support. Despite the low cost, it doesn't stint on features at all. After a quick and painless installation on my test Windows 2003 server, I was presented with an easy Web interface and an instantly-functional Web mail client, and had no trouble getting the thing sending and receiving messages very quickly. SurgeMail offers good support for a variety of relevant standards as well as a reasonable batch of extra features, such as calendar and photo-sharing support in the WebMail client.

The server supports all the protocols you'd expect - POP3. SMTP and ESMTP, IMAP, and the various secure variants. You can set up your own user accounts within SurgeMail, but it also supports authentication modules that let you store the user accounts elsewhere - Windows or Unix user accounts, LDAP accounts, or even a MySQL database or proprietary system. You can configure accounts so that they have access to only some services, so, for example, you can set up WebMail-only accounts, and you can set storage quotas for accounts as well.

The Spam and virus scanning options here are reasonably flexible as well. You get a batch of ways to ban particular senders (by IP, number of bad addresses on a message, and so on), support for Aspam (a "scoring" system for determining whether messages are spam, similar to the way Exchange's Junk Mail Filter works), and support for RBLs and SPF. You can also configure things to run every message through a virus scanner if you want. Administration of everything is easy through the Web interface, which provides both numerical status on everything and pretty graphs for those who'd rather take in information at a glance.

Other goodies you'll find built in to the base package include support for multiple virtual domains, server mirroring and fallover, notification and message delivery via SMS, and the ability to configure things with split front-end/back-end mail servers for large organizations. I didn't test performance and scalability myself, but NetWin claims you can support tens of thousands of users on a single multiprocessor box, and they have some satisfied reference customers to prove it. If you're an all-Microsoft shop, of course, you'd give up some of the deep integration between Outlook and Exchange if you moved to SurgeMail. But if you're a small development shop abusing your MSDN license to run an illegal Exchange server for youe main e-mail, SurgeMail offers an attractive way to get a full-featured and legal server for a very reasonable price.

  Click for larger screenshot

Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.