With a range of e-mail servers targeted at companies of all sizes, Rockliffe's e-mail solutions can provide as much or as little complexity as you need.

by Jeff Goldman [July 21, 2004]

Rockliffe was founded in 1995 and shipped its first product, MailSite Version 1, in 1996. "We've been growing consistently since that time, and we've maintained our exclusive focus on secure, standards-based e-mail software," says John Davies, the company's President and CEO.

In the years since the release of Version 1, the product has changed significantly. "Version 1 was really a very basic-functionality, single-server, limited-scalability product for Windows," Davies says. "I don't know if you can remember back that far in the dim mists of Internet time, but back then, really the only other standards-based e-mail servers out there were running on UNIX."

Rockliffe (408) 879-5600 sales@rockliffe.com

The product's first big milestone after its initial release was the addition of clustering capability. "In 2000, we delivered the first cluster-capable version of MailSite, Version 4," Davies says. "That allowed our customers to set up a cluster of Windows servers to host e-mail, giving them the scalability and the fault tolerance that they needed."

Since then, the focus has been on adding functionality. "We've enhanced the clustering technology in the product, and we've improved the fault tolerance and the load balancing," Davies says. "We've also delivered additional security capability—and we've added webmail capability."

A custom fit
Rockliffe's offering covers four product lines—MailSite SE for small and midsize businesses; MailSite LE for large enterprises; MailSite SP for service providers; and MailSite NS, which uses the HP NonStop server, for telcos and larger service providers.

The webmail offering, MailSite Express, is fully integrated with the MailSite server product. "It has all of the capabilities you would expect in a webmail, including spell checkers in multiple languages and a user interface that can be reconfigured in different languages on the fly," Davies says. "It's also very easy for our ISP customers to brand with their look and feel."

MailSite Express, Davies says, can also be integrated with most ISP billing systems. "If our customers wish to sell it as a value added service, they can do that," he says. "It's integrated as a provisioning option at the mailbox level. We have customers running it with Rodopi, with Boardtown, and with IEA's Emerald—it's quite easy to integrate it with any third party billing system that uses a database."

For customers using MailSite's cluster functionality, the webmail can be clustered as well. "They can have two or more webmail servers as part of the cluster, and they can use a load balancing switch to distribute traffic across those two webmail servers," he says. "If one of them goes down, then the traffic is automatically redirected to the one that's still running."

Rockliffe's newest product, MailSite MP—MP stands for Message Protector—serves as an e-mail gateway providing spam and virus protection. The product is available both as software and as a hosted service to work with any e-mail server, and similar spam and virus filters are also available for the MailSite server products.

Pricing for the products starts at $595 for MailSite SE. MailSite LE starts at $1,750, and MailSite SP, with clustering capability, starts at $12,500. MailSite MP starts at $595, and anti-virus and anti-spam filters for the MailSite products start at $595 each.

Targeting ISPs
Service providers, Davies says, comprise a significant portion of the company's customer base. "We have a good number of mid-tier service providers running our MailSite SP cluster product to host e-mail for hundreds of thousands of mailboxes," he says.

One of those ISPs is Advanced Broadband, a subsidiary of the home building company, Toll Brothers. "Bob Toll, the CEO of our company, wanted to keep some money in house instead of giving it to Comcast or the local franchise for data and video," says Mark Gonzalez, the company's Network Operations Manager.

The result, Gonzalez says, was the formation of Advanced Broadband about five years ago. "For e-mail, we were going to use an Exchange server, but we decided it was way too complicated," he says. "A company that we had talked with about doing our community Intranets had recommended Rockliffe, so we did some research, and it ended up being a really good fit."

MailSite's greatest strength, he says, is its ease of use. "It's easy to maintain the database and to get the e-mail accounts going," Gonzalez says. "For the end users, whether it's IMAP or POP3 or web-based e-mail, they love it."

Five years ago, Gonzalez says, Rockliffe's webmail offering was also a key selling point. "A lot of the other third party providers didn't have the web interface at the time that we started looking at this," he says. "They had the POP3 and the IMAP, which is fine, but the webmail was definitely the biggest seller for us."

The company's support, he adds, has been responsive. "It's been really pleasant," Gonzalez says. "Whenever I've had problems with doing multiple servers for backup and what have you, it's been good—I've never had an issue. The tech support's been right on."

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Related articles:
	[April 21, 2004]	A Frequently E-Mailed Question
	[Sept. 25, 2003]	Rockliffe's MailSite Adds Anti-Spam
	[June 20, 2002]	Optimism is the Message

Online resource:
	Webmail Directory