The Linux developer's latest offering is a slick new webmail solution called Tuxedo.

by Jeff Goldman [November 14, 2008]

The Canadian Linux development house LinuxMagic, founded in 1997, is a subsidiary of the hosting and support company Wizard IT Services. From the beginning, according to company president and CEO Michael Peddemors, LinuxMagic has been focused on serving ISPs and telcos.

It was that focus, Peddemors says, that led to the development of LinuxMagic's e-mail server, MagicMail. "Our niche market tended to be helping people with problems surrounding all of the infrastructures that ISPs run—for instance, their web servers, their mail servers, DNS servers… but the largest amount of problems always seemed to surround e-mail," he says.

LinuxMagic (604) 589-0100 sales@linuxmagic.com

At the time, Peddemors says, there was nothing designed specifically for ISPs. "Most people were still running either homegrown open source solutions, or they were trying to take a product that was built for the enterprise and get it to scale to ISP levels…so we rolled up all the stuff we'd been working on with some of our early ISP adopters, and tried to create the perfect turnkey made-by-ISP-for-ISP mail server," he says.

Making life easier
Peddemors says MagicMail is now in use at a wide range of ISPs and telcos, from smaller providers with 500 users to those with a subscriber base of more than 100,000. "It's all about making life easier for e-mail administrators again," he says. "E-mail should be simple. It's harder and harder for ISPs to have an in-house e-mail and anti-spam expert, so it's easier to have a turnkey solution that deals with all these things."

The fact that it's a complete solution, Peddemors says, is a key selling point. "In order to provide proper e-mail services, it's not just about the e-mail software itself—you really have to design the system from the operating system up," he says. "So MagicMail comes as a complete Linux solution, right from the operating system."

To minimize total cost of ownership, Peddemors says, MagicMail is licensed for unlimited users and unlimited domains—and there are other factors that increase affordability as well. "By giving the customers more control over managing their own e-mail, like for instance creating all their own mailboxes…and being able to do their own spam controls, it creates a loyalty factor," he says.

Tuxedo webmail
LinuxMagic's latest offering is Tuxedo, its new webmail solution. The company's previous webmail product, Peddemors says, was a highly customized and modified version of Squirrelmail. "People have always loved it because it's fast, performs real quick—perfect for the dialup market—but nowadays, with everybody moving towards high speed, people are wanting more AJAX-style drag-and-drop, with features you might expect from your desktop application," he says.

So Tuxedo is based on RoundCube rather than Squirrelmail. "We looked at that as being the farthest along towards what the customers wanted—but for the ISP market, trying to install your own open source package, set it up, configure it and brand it, these are all difficult things for a lot of people," Peddemors says. "What we wanted to do is create something that anybody could install on any server."

In addition to the company's established MagicMail customer base, Peddemors says, LinuxMagic wanted to target Tuxedo at ISPs that might not have deployed MagicMail. "So we released Tuxedo as a standalone product and made it so it could be deployed anywhere… we wanted something that anybody could install, and that would already, out of the box, look hot," he says.

Pricing and integration
At $219 for unlimited users, Peddemors says, the price is right. "For a lot of the products that are out there, a person is expected to have some knowledge of installing a database or working with CSS or HTML or PHP. At $219, if you wanted to contract somebody to help you do it, you couldn't get anybody to even start your graphics work for the price you can buy something that's ready out of the box," he says.

For deployments with MagicMail, of course, you do get extra functionality in Tuxedo. "You can click on items and automatically select something, to blacklist anything that's in your inbox or to whitelist something that's in your spam box," Peddemors says. "And it incorporates all of our spam tools if people want to personalize their anti-spam settings."

As with all of LinuxMagic's products, Peddemors says, the focus is on ease of use. "As soon as people see a MagicMail demo, the typical comment from an administrator is, 'If I had the time and the money, if I was going to build a mail server from scratch, I'd build it exactly like MagicMail,'" he says. "That's the biggest compliment you can give us."

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Related articles:
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	[April 21, 2004]	A Frequently E-Mailed Question
	[Sept. 27, 2002]	NetZero Unleashes WebMail

Online resource:
	Webmail Directory
	Webmail Quick Reference Chart