Besides updating its iTools and Xtools products, Tenon Intersystems, under the auspices of their Japanese partner, Open Technologies, will be bringing Post.Office to Mac OS X.
Post.Office is a scalable SMTP/POP3/IMAP messaging server designed to meet the needs of small and mid-sized Internet service providers (ISPs). Post.Office can support 10 users “or a hundred thousand users on a single platform with appropriately configured hardware,” according to Tenon President Anita Holmgren. Post.Office will be available on Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server 10.0 from Open Technologies in the fourth quarter and will be solely distributed by Tenon.
Post.Office was designed from the ground up for ease of use, with an uncomplicated, user-friendly interface, Holmgren said. The “anywhere, anytime” Web forms provide seamless navigation through the many Post.Office features, she added.
“System administrators can make changes from anywhere on the Internet using Web forms with simple fill-in-the-blank fields and pop-up options,” Holmgren said. “Postmasters can use Post.Office to administer enterprise e-mail systems. End users can specify how their mail should be handled, join mailing lists and manage mailing lists.”
Post.Office doesn’t run with “root” privileges and operates independently of the host computer system, making it virtually impossible to compromise the main system security via the e-mail program, she added. Other security features include multiple password protection levels, restricted user access to specific domains or hosts, limiting user forms to appropriate subsets and Postmaster notification in the event of suspicious activity.
To curb the proliferation of mass unsolicited e-mail (spam), Post.Office offers SMTP mail relay protection to restrict the system and/or users who may try to use the ISP’s email server to relay messages. Plus, the mail blocking feature can stop the delivery of all mail from a particular system, domain, e-mail address or user name to prevent “denial-of-service” attacks, Holmgren said.
Post.Office offers three auto-reply settings to choose from: Vacation, Reply and Echo. It can be instructed to issue a pre-set, automatic reply to senders, returning the incoming message or any chosen message as instructed. It offers a built-in list manager and a variety of configuration options to manage system resources, including administrator-definable limits and parameters.
Pricing and availability haven’t been announced. However, crossgrades and sidegrades will be available for users of competing Mac mail servers and for users of Tenon products.