MailSite from Rockliffe is a Windows-based email system based on open standards such as SMTP and POP3 and geared to handling large numbers of messages. Version 6, launched this summer, has been updated with a spam filter to automatically prevent unsolicited email from reaching users' mailboxes. Later this month, Rockliffe will launch a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook that enables it to store calendar and contact details on the MailSite server rather than on a Microsoft Exchange server.

The anti-spam engine is an integrated version of ActiveState's anti-spam service. As with the built-in F-Secure antivirus software, companies must pay an additional licence fee to get the automated updates from the service provider.

MailSite can apply several spam filters to messages, including filters based on keywords, heuristics, white-lists and blacklists. However, much of the complexity is hidden from IT staff, who have options only to disable or enable the filters either for servers, domains, or individual users. Operational tuning such as adding new spam signatures is done by ActiveState, which by default will automatically update the rules used by MailSite's filters every hour. While some firms might prefer to have tighter control over filter rules, we found the 98 percent accuracy claimed by Rockliffe to be a good compromise that removes most spam from the system without imposing an unacceptable management burden on IT staff.

IT Week Labs tested MailSite 6 using a virtual machine running Windows 2000 Server and hosted on an IBM x440 server running VMware's ESX Server software.

MailSite is installed from a CD-ROM and this took only a few minutes. However, we needed to disable the SMTP service that was activated when Windows was installed using default settings. We would like to see Rockliffe integrate this step into the installation utility in due course.

Next, we needed to decide where to store individual mailboxes. Small sites can work with mailboxes held in the Windows registry, which keeps MailSite users' data separate from Windows users' data. Alternatively, MailSite users can be stored alongside Windows users in the NT user database. Larger firms or ISPs would probably configure MailSite to use a database. Rockliffe supplies a set of SQL scripts to create mailboxes, and said these work with servers running Microsoft SQL Server and the open-source MySQL databases.

We first configured MailSite to act as a gateway, or mail transport agent (MTA), to receive email for some users, filter it for viruses and spam, and then forward suitable messages for final delivery to the appropriate user mailboxes hosted on an external system. While most firms would probably use the open-source Sendmail for this type of processing, they would also need to set up and manage the antivirus and anti-spam tools, which could be time-consuming.

However, few companies would use MailSite as a simple gateway. Most also need to host the mailboxes on their own servers, and this is MailSite's core function. When we tried to add a new user mailbox in our test we found it took only a few moments to locate the appropriate menu item and complete the dialog boxes.

We were also able to easily configure accounts for access using POP3 and web-based clients, although we needed to manually update the IIS configuration to complete this arrangement.

MailSite also includes an email list feature to support email-based collaborative work, and it can maintain associated web sites that automatically archive postings and make them available online. There are also options to enable multiple mailboxes to be managed as a group.

Price: 5,000 mailboxes cost $2.50 per mailbox per year; spam filtering costs an additional $5.85 per mailbox; and antivirus filtering costs an additional $3.90 per mailbox

Contact: Rockliffe 0113 383 0125