Reality Check

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Green
Posts: 31
Joined: Tue Apr 25, 2006 6:46 am

Reality Check

Post by Green »

I would like to suggest to MailEnable to start focusing on the stuff that is important and spend less time on stuff that is not. And understand that I'm not some flybynight-user having a quick dig here. I have been using ME for almost a decade now and convincing customers to use it themselves. I have in fact have shared Premium MEs in various datacentres for about the same time.

Stuff that is important (even if ME does not think so):

You have literally thousands of posts on your forum relating to hacking attempts, yet, the best you have to offer is to refer people back to localhost policies - It may occur to you after a couple of years of release that those policies are in fact a waste of time. All those policies are good for is for getting valid end-users' IPs blocked if anyone in their office forgets or resets their password and leaves Outlook to try pulling emails overnight. Not only does it not solve the issue, it in fact makes more work for the admins of a MailEnable server. This can be solved easily, and freely I might add, by implementing GeoIP checks per domain/account (see http://forum.mailenable.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=27453), i.e. allowing only authentication attempts from specific region's IPs. The technology exists and is actually free for use, all ME has to do is use it.

You charge Microsoft ActiveSync licenses when the exact protocol have been opened to everyone in the EU and ActiveSync functionality can be found embedded in tens of open source mail servers made compatible with the ActiveSync standard since 2012. See places like http://www.openchange.org/ and http://www.sogo.nu/ So, again, open and freely available software which can be implemented in Mail Enable, releasing all customers from paying for ActiveSync licensing as well as the ME Outlook Plugin local installations. It is simply not acceptable that ME can't harden their server against hacking using intelligence instead of brawn, nor acceptable that ME can't roll out embedded and 100% activesync and exchange compatibility when half the planet's open source solutions do exactly that.

Stuff that recently seem important to ME, but is not:

You roll out mail searching/indexing and a million webmail updates as if it is the only mail client people are using. When the reality is, 100% of people use their Outlook/Thunderbird/Mobile/Tablet/etc local clients 99% of the time. The only time when webmail is even marginally important is when someone is on vacation and without their laptop/tablet and want to check their email from an internet cafe (does these still exist?) - as said, <1% of the time. So ME spends almost 100% of their development on less than 1% of their product's usage.

ME has had only marginal improvements over the last few years, and it becomes really, really very hard to justify to customers why they should pay for ME when they can have the exact same thing for free - in fact, when they can have something that rolls out and scales better than ME, for free. And whilst ME was ahead of the curve a decade ago in many respects, ME has now fallen behind the curve by just about the same distance.

That being said, even I would rather support ME when I know their is a dedicated and focused team of developers constantly working on it and ensuring that releases are stable and working... versus the inverse which is usually the case with most open source solutions. Especially if they work on the important things. But that argument only goes so far, after which it becomes a function for function comparison - and if ME does not stack up against the competition, well, then the future for ME looks pretty bleak.

Regards
ME Ent Pre 9.62
WinOS 2012R2

Admin
Site Admin
Posts: 1127
Joined: Mon Jun 10, 2002 6:31 pm
Location: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Re: Reality Check

Post by Admin »

Hi,

Thanks for the time spent in your post, as we appreciate feedback. ActiveSync is a licensed protocol from Microsoft, and not something we can legally provide for free. Open software is available that does include ActiveSync, but to quote their documentation "In order to use this software in production environments, you need to get a proper usage license from Microsoft. Please contact them directly to negotiate the fees associated to your user base.". The Outlook plugin is not licensed from Microsoft, as it does not require it, but it did cost a lot of money to develop, so is not something we can provide for free (similar products are more expensive). For webmail usage, we do have a surprisingly large amount of domains that use it exclusively, although we don't spend the majority of time on webmail. We are working on improved methods to help reduce and block abuse as you mention, through product options and reporting.

Thanks!

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