If you run a diverse business, you probably run a
diverse email environment. A diverse environment means a potpourri of software packages,
often with stopgap measures designed to let dissimilar mail systems communicate with one
another. Infinite
Interchange email server, from Infinite Technologies, is a complete remote-access
electronic mail software solution that can bring order to your company's email systems.
Infinite Interchange lets remote users access your
company's email server
over the Internet or a LAN using various methods. These methods include access from an
Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) 4 client, such as pine on UNIX systems, and
Post
Office Protocol (POP) 3 clients, such as Qualcom's Eudora Pro running on Windows-based
systems. You can even use software such as UP.Phone and Message Handling System (MHS)
mailboxes as the message source.
Infinite Interchange includes an innovative Web
interface that lets users read, respond to, compose, and manage their electronic mailboxes
from any Web browser. This component, called WebMail, lets remote users use their browsers
to point to the Infinite Interchange email server to retrieve their email. You no longer
need a special electronic mail application on remote computers, nor do you need to open up
your network's firewall to pass traffic through non-Web IP ports.
Installing Infinite Interchange is not difficult. I
installed the software on my Micronics-based home-built dual-Pentium II machine running
Windows NT Server 4.0 in less than 5 minutes. The only reason installation took that long
was because my test copy arrived on three disks rather than a CD-ROM. No reboot was
necessary.
Because Infinite Interchange email server is a
middleware layer between your users and their electronic mailboxes, it requires a large
amount of time and administration knowledge to properly set up. The first step is to
create your email interfaces. The software supports interfaces to Microsoft Exchange,
ExpressIT!, Microsoft Mail File Format API (FFAPI), IMAP4 clients, Messaging API (MAPI)
clients, POP3 clients, System Measurement Facility (SMF) and MHS systems, Simple Mail
Transfer Protocol (SMTP) systems, and Lotus Notes and cc:Mail systems. Each email
interface has configuration nuances, which means you need to be knowledgeable of at your
company's email systems to set the proper parameters.
After configuring your email interfaces, you need to
add users to Infinite Interchange's configuration so they can access their e-mail. The
software can import user lists from different sources (e.g., Exchange Server) to help
reduce your workload. You can also individually register each user.
Another advanced feature I enjoyed is the software
product's rules-based system for processing email messages. You can create server-based
rules that tell Infinite Interchange email server when to automatically forward messages,
delete messages, change messages' status, and reply to messages. Rules contain include and
exclude conditions that specify when Infinite Interchange is to apply these rules.
WebMail is a pleasure to use. After you log on with a
username and password, Infinite Interchange email server retrieves your email and
dynamically creates an HTML page to display your messages. All messages in your Inbox
appear in an HTML table, and you can read a message by clicking the From column. You can
also click one of seven icons at the top of the Web page to perform tasks, such as send a
new message, review old messages, or customize WebMail's appearance and performance. When
sending a message with WebMail, you have all the options found in a regular e-mail
program--you can send carbon copies, set message priority, maintain an address book, and
use the spelling checker. When spell checking a document, the software automatically makes
each misspelled word a hyperlink, so you can automatically correct the problem with a few
clicks.
For such a powerful software product, Infinite
Interchange email server is reasonably priced. A free trial version of the software is
available so you can try it before you buy it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael P. Deignan is an associate technical editor for Windows NT Magazine
and president of Ideamation, a consulting firm based in Providence, Rhode Island.
