The maker of a well known e-mail server adds several significant upgrades, aimed at ISPs with large subscriber bases and ISPs with business customers.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [July 14, 2005]

IceWarp, the Limassol, Cyprus-based makers of Merak Mail Server, is adding features targeted at ISP customers. The company ran hourly demos at ISPCON, and has since released further updates, most recently on June 22, 2005.

The press release dated that day, announcing version 8.2, notes, "Merak was designed to meet the needs of ISPs with globally dispersed subscribers and enterprise business with multi-location deployments."

Christopher Grady, president of the U.S. operations of IceWarp, says the company is focusing on ISPs. "The largest ISP install I know of is a 16 server install, load balanced. We're concentrating heavily on the ISP market. It's just by sheer demand that we got into the SMB market. That brought us into groupware and IM. But Merak Mail Server was originally developed for ISPs, so we're focusing on fine tuning for speed at heavy loads."

Grady is also enthusiastic about Linux. "A lot of ISPs want Linux. Of course Merak Mail Server runs perfectly well on Windows, especially Windows 2000, where it has a significant following, and you can put up to 35,000 users on a Windows machine running Merak Mail Server. But Linux is significantly faster—at least eight times as fast—allowing a significant increase in the number of users per server."

The product is designed to be customized by the ISP. The GUI is XML driven, so that everything from layout to access permission can be modified by the ISP administrator. "Companies can develop their own groupware or e-mail interface," enthuses Grady.

Grady says the company provides top notch support to its U.S. customers, made possible in part by the low number of support calls. He says most inquiries come when a company is starting out, either configuring the server at the NOC or doing its first large business install. "99 percent of inquiries are related to training. But we have our level 3 guys doing web support, not level one. If you need us to access your systems, that's paid support. So we're expanding to put in a state of the art training center and we will have web-based training as well."

Pricing and availability
The product is available now. Pricing was not disclosed, but pricing bundles can be viewed here.

Reviews and further information
For reviews and more detailed information about the features of Merak Mail Server, visit the Merak Mail Server page on ServerWatch.

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