SmartMax's MailMax e-mail server and MailMax/WEB webmail client offer ISPs a complete and customizable e-mail solution.

by Jeff Goldman [November 17, 2004]

SmartMax Software, Inc. was founded in 1992 with the development of the Excalibur BBS for Windows. "It sold like crazy, and in 1995 it won the Windows Magazine Top 100," says Eric Weber, the company's president. "Then shortly thereafter, Microsoft signed a deal for Internet Explorer with AOL, and it just completely blind-sided that whole dialup/telecommunication industry—and we had to pick up the pieces."

The company then changed direction to focus on developing a mail server, releasing version 1.0 of MailMax in 1995. The fact that the solution enabled banning and blocking of e-mail addresses, Weber says, drew some strong reactions. "Programmers were saying, 'Hey, you can't do that: that's against the spec," he says. "But I wanted to do it—and I honestly think we were the first ones to incorporate any type of bans and blocks into the product."

SmartMax Software, Inc. (877) 624-5629 sales@smartmax.com

In addition to its own spam filtering solution, the company also works with anti-virus products from Sophos and Avast. "They're integrated with the product," Weber says. "They don't spawn out and run an external process—it's API-level integration with our product, with live updates down to the hour."

The server, Weber says, was also one of the first to use an industry-standard database, first Access and now Microsoft SQL. "For ISPs that want to massage that data with some other application, it's nice to have built the product on Microsoft SQL," he says. "The database connectivity is really a big selling point—and the product's always been that way."

E-mail unification
The company's webmail solution, MailMax/WEB, is available for an additional fee. Weber says one of MailMax/WEB's greatest strengths is the simple fact that it's IMAP-based. "We've had four versions of MailMax/WEB, and it was difficult going early on," he says. "People would go home and they'd pop their mail out of their box, and they'd expect to see the same e-mail in their webmail."

In order to help customers keep better track of their e-mail, Weber says, the company switched from POP3 to IMAP in MailMax/WEB 4.0. "That allows unification from both, say, Outlook Express and MailMax/WEB," he says. "That's really what our customers like about the product—that it's IMAP-based and you've got unification of e-mail. They can go home and get the same mail that they get at work."

MailMax/WEB is designed to work exclusively with the MailMax e-mail server. Weber says it wouldn't be too hard to tinker with the product and get it to work with another server if necessary, but that it's much easier to support in combination with MailMax. "When somebody calls with an issue, the logical step is to support both the server and the MailMax/Web piece," he says.

The webmail interface itself, Weber says, can be customized easily by anyone who knows HTML. "A lot of people have customized it to look completely different than our incarnation," he says. "I'd say customization is one of the things people like about it most—we don't have templates for it like some other companies, but most people turn this over to their website developers or their Web guys and just change the icons, or even change the whole flow of the product."

Administration and pricing
ISPs can administer MailMax either through a Web administration interface or through a downloadable desktop client. "When I administer, that's what I use, because I would much rather use a full app than a browser," Weber says. "But they're both pretty rich applications."

Both interfaces provide a wide range of information. "You can turn on tracing and see the activities of the server as it's going through them in real time," Weber says. "You can watch logins in and out—you just right-click and select what you want—as well as SMTP connections in a graphical view, POP3 connections the same way, messages received, IMAP connections, and bytes received. It's not meant to be a statistical replacement, but it certainly is nice to be able to see, in real time, what's going on with the server."

The ISP version of MailMax is priced at $849, and the webmail client and anti-virus solutions are available for an additional fee—all pricing is listed on the company's Web site. The offering, Weber says, is designed for ISPs of all sizes—and there are now more than 4,000 installations of the product worldwide. "We've got some large ISPs, we've got small businesses, very small businesses—a little bit of everything," he says.

SmartMax Software's newest product is SightMax, a live chat product designed to compete directly with LivePerson. For ISPs, Weber says, it can either be used for online support or to resell to hosting customers. "For clients in e-commerce, your website is your storefront, and without a product similar to SightMax or LivePerson, it's a store with no salespeople," he says. "You certainly wouldn't run a retail store without any salespeople—why should your website be a storefront with no salespeople? And that's what live chat does for a site."

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