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Mail.com began business in 1996, with its co- founder, Gary Millon, seeing e-mail's lucrative years ahead as the most sought-after Internet service. Today's edge for Mail.com is its ability to offer a wide spectrum of mail service features and options, depending on customers' profiles and business needs, ranging from access-anywhere e-mail systems to traditional e-mail. Mail.com struts its ability to go the marketing route and do opt-in mail systems for companies wanting to increase Web traffic. Then Mail.com can wave system management hats when necessary, or focus their strengths on firewall services, such as virus scanning, spam blocking, and content filtering.
Peter Hamlen, Mail.com's chief architect, listens carefully to prospects' questions and notes what they say when they first consider Mail.com . "Exchange or Lotus Notes compatibility may be one of the selling points, but that's not the most important. Reliability and speed are at the top of customer checklists," says Hamlen. "Employees at these companies, after all, are pressing their send buttons and all asking the same question:Did it get there yet?" As for the executive decision makers who directly talk to Mail.com, they want to know: "How reliable is the platform you're offering?" and "Are you sure we can use it?"
Reliability, says Hamlen, is the non-negotiable. That's why, as messaging providers for businesses, Mail.com turned to sendmail early on as its choice Internet mail gateway. Mail.com grew up with sendmail, and then went to Sendmail Inc. Sendmail handles all of Mail.com's incoming and outgoing traffic.Hamlen has no doubts that starting out with sendmail and sticking with Sendmail Inc. was the right way to go. "Based on Open Source, sendmail was the low-cost option. But beyond that, sendmail solved a tricky problem: One must speak the SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) protocol correctly.
"People have written their own SMTP protocol handlers all over the place. Sites in Germany and China, for example, deal with protocols a little bit differently, and do not follow the specs altogether. Sendmail handles all of them correctly. In addition, it's an extremely reliable platform. So, even though we initially looked at sendmail because it was free, we found that Sendmail Inc. was carrying advanced features for business customers."
Hamlen follows the Open Source philosophy and believes Open Source enables messaging products that work extremely well. "Open Source to Mail.com means quality assurance. We follow Open Source computing for all our protocols," he says. "We also contribute to Open Source, in that we make a variety of tools available. We use Open Source-only
code on our systems other than the code we write ourselves."
This brings Hamlen to another reason for sticking with Sendmail:technology support. "Sendmail has given us a fair amount of help in important areas, as in configurations, spam blocking, and error handling."
In the e-mail outsourcing business, managers need to take on varied computing environments and technology applications that can talk to one another, especially in this Internet age where back-office applications must be easily accessed and synchronized for Internet immediacy. "One major challenge for Mail.com was in having to have Sendmail interact with an Oracle database," says Hamlen. Sendmail responded promptly, he adds, and helped Mail.com write the code to access Oracle. Hamlen uses the Oracle case as a good example of why Sendmail offers the company unique value. "We get both advantages now: world standards-based technology of Open Source and commercial support."
Performance is another reason that Sendmail is Mail.com's gateway of choice. Hamlen and team have seen other flavors of e-mail
systems around like qmail and have examined them. But after doing load tests, the testers at Mail.com found "tremendous" performance only with Sendmail. "It might be possible to get the others to go faster, but Sendmail gave us incredible throughput."
MAIL.COM AT A GLANCE
WHAT IT SELLS
Internet messaging services for businesses, ISPs, and Web sites.
SUCH AS...
Hosted Web/POP3-based e-mail services; Firewall services such as virus scanning, spam blocking, and content filtering.
SIZE
Infrastructure of IP network facilities in 20 key countries, serving over 17 million mailboxes and 9,000 corporate customers.
WHAT MAIL.COM PURCHASED
Sendmail Pro, the commercial MTA version. Sendmail is being used for all incoming and outgoing traffic.
GOALS
Expanding services.
REASONS FOR SENDMAIL
Industrial-strength technology enabling Mail.com to deliver reliability; need to rely on Open Source standards-based sendmail tested in real-world settings; good scalability.
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