Mail Server Setup

For a while I was using Mercury/32 as my mail server. It's a great little program and very robust. But (based on what I've read on the support list) depending on the specific setup it seems it can be a little flaky with regard to stability. I've started to run into problems my self. But beyond that fact there are a few things about the program that I'm not too happy with. The biggest of those is the fact that M32 doesn't have an option to run as a service. Sure it can be addressed via various run-as-a-service programs ... but it's not quite the same and generally makes management a little more difficult.

So I recently switched to a new mail server, hMail Server. What brought it to my attention was it's database capabilities. I was actually looking for a program that stored the actual messages in a database. Sure it would be a lot of overhead, but there would be so much more flexibility for access and archiving ... depending on how the database was set up. hMail isn't quite what I was looking for, but it's integration with Windows made it pretty good. No need to get into the details, you can get that from the site. So I'll just leave it at the fact that I've been very happy so far. Plus, I've been able to implement just about all the functionality I was using in M32 ... making it a good drop-in replacement (well ... almost since I'm using IMAP).

M32 is supposed to be undergoing an overhaul right now. It'll be interesting to see how it progresses. I'll have to give it another look once the next major revision is released. If nothing else the native support for running as a service will be a most welcome change.