Merak Mail Server offers affordable pricing, and a product adaptable enough to fill the needs of anyone from a two-person home office to a multinational corporation.

by Jeff Goldman [July 28, 2004]

Merak Mail Server, Inc. is the U.S. company selling the Merak Mail Server product, which was originally developed in 1998 by IceWarp Software in the Czech Republic. While IceWarp continues to sell the product in Europe, Merak focuses on the U.S. market.

The product can support just about any size of ISP. "We have customers ranging from small businesses all the way up to some of the largest companies in the world," says Chris Grady, Merak's President. "I'm pretty sure we're one of the only companies out there that targets the entire spectrum of the market, from a small, two-person home office all the way to multimillion-user load-balanced installations."

Merak Mail Server (703) 971-9400 info@MerakMailServer.com

Regardless of the product or products you purchase, it's relatively easy to adjust Merak's solution to fit your needs as you grow. "Someone starting out in a two-person company could scale gracefully from the smallest of installations all the way up to a fully load balanced installation, starting with the same piece of software," Grady says.

Merak's webmail offering can be purchased either as a standalone product or as an integrated solution with the Merak Mail Server. Because the standalone product simply works through SMTP and POP protocols, though, it can't do some of the things that the integrated version can, such as enabling users to change their passwords, arrange auto-responders, etc.

As a result, Grady says, most customers choose the integrated solution. "The standalone webmail is a relatively small part of our sales, but we're going to keep it out there because we have an existing customer base that uses it, and we continue to upgrade it for them as well," he says.

Buffet style pricing
All pricing is listed on the company's web site, and is set up to allow clients to purchase only the tools they need. "All of our products except for the standalone webmail are incorporated into one single download," Grady says. "You simply purchase the functionality that you'd like to use, put the license in, and it immediately becomes available on the interface."

Merak's relatively low prices, Grady says, have caused some confusion. "When we first started out, we had a lot of companies that overlooked us," he says. "Larger corporations are looking in a certain price range, and we don't fall in that range, which is a big problem for us."

He admits that the concern is understandable. "I do the same thing myself when I'm looking at other products," Grady says. "You pretty much know what it takes for a company to survive, and I know that the mindset is, 'They couldn't possibly have that great a product, and they couldn't possibly have the infrastructure available, for the price that they're charging.' But we've done it a different way."

The aim is to give clients as much choice as possible. "It's kind of a buffet style," Grady says. "We're not going to corner our customers into buying things that they don't need. So you can start with the mail server, you can add anti-spam, you can add anti-virus, you can add groupware, you can add instant messaging, you can add webmail capability—and you only pay for the features you're interested in."

Merak's product support operates on a similar principle. "The product is incredibly stable—it really doesn't need phone support—so we've taken the cost of phone support out of it," Grady says. "We do have free web-based support, and for 90 to 95 percent of our customers, that's perfectly fine. Then we have paid phone support, which is billed per minute with no minimum requirement, and we have support contracts on top of that."

Customer driven
Grady is proud of Merak's responsiveness to customer requests, particularly regarding security issues. "A while back, we had the issue with the password-protected zip files containing viruses that were getting through to everybody," he says. "Within two to three hours, I called the developers and we had a discussion about how to solve it, and within 72 hours we had a release. Our customers were some of the first to be able to block that, even before the virus scanners could."

Stability, Grady says, is another key strength. "We've gotten most of our business from customers who have left another platform to come to ours for the purposes of stability and security," he says. "We have customers that report two-plus years of uninterrupted uptime on the Windows 2000 server platform. It's been incredibly stable."

Bill Pennie is Systems Administrator for ActiveHost, a Windows-based web hosting company founded in 1996. Over the years, Pennie says, he's been through quite a number of different mail solutions. "It seemed like nobody out there was doing it right, at least in the Windows environment," he says. "Then, through research, we came across Merak."

The company only started working with Merak about six months ago, and they're still in the process of putting together a highly customized solution. "We're going with a nine-server cluster where everything is broken out into its own server," Pennie says. "That wasn't where Merak first envisioned their product, but working together with them and our expertise on our end, we've been able to get it to work."

Pennie says Merak's webmail solution, in particular, is wonderfully easy to use. "I love the interface," he says. "Everything is very intuitive from a customer standpoint, as opposed to other mail servers that we've dealt with. The new Merak interface is pretty much close to Outlook—if you use Outlook, you can use this webmail."

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Online resource:
	Webmail Directory