There are the odd occasions in this line of work when I’m presented with an application that causes me to exclaim ‘I don’t believe it’. Office Mail from Burrotech is one such example.
This program is so simple to install and configure that a novice could have it running in less than ten minutes, and it offers an amazing amount of power. It’s not only a simple mail server/gateway to collect and deliver external POP3 and SMTP mail, but also provides intelligent routing to unlimited internal mail accounts on your LAN. And that’s just scraping the surface. Office Mail also features anti-virus protection, collection scheduling, copying and forwarding of mail and autoresponder services.
Impressed? You should be, and it gets better. The licence for unlimited users is available free of charge. Yep, hard to believe, but it’s true. Burrotech is happy for you to download it, try it and continue using it for free. You just have to put up with a two-line advertising signature on every message and do without the ability to leave messages on the POP server. If you pay for a licence (US$49) catering for unlimited seats, advertising will be removed, custom footers will be enabled and full technical support will be thrown in.
So what do you get for your money -- or even for nothing? The answer is a very competent, if somewhat basic, mail server. Office Mail isn’t aimed at the enterprise customer, nor does it aspire to replace anything like Microsoft Exchange. It’s firmly aimed at small businesses, home users and education -- the sort of people looking for a basic email distribution and management system for a small LAN, which works effectively with existing client software such as Outlook.
Aliases are put to very good use, and they enable one POP account to be shared by an entire office. Sure, it’s a simple approach, which means you don’t get such things as IMAP support or ODBC, but that’s the point -- this keeps it simple. By removing the frills, Burrotech has stripped out the high cost factor and the configuration nightmare
It works well without any great resource overhead -- you can run Office Mail quite happily from the taskbar on any old PC, and it doesn’t demand a dedicated workstation either. In this broadband age, the ability to run an email server is being made available to an increasing number of users who couldn’t afford it even a year or two ago. Plus, costs aside, the sheer complexity of the applications previously ensured that installation and configuration remained in the realm of the (expensive) specialist. Office Mail, however, blows up both these barriers in one fell swoop.