Select the 12 main elements of the email server

For network administrators, It is a multi-factor comprehensive decision-making problem to select Mail Server products with complete functions and reasonable prices based on their business needs. While there are many factors to consider when selecting an email server, however, we should focus on the product's system support capabilities, service protocol support capabilities, multi-mail server support capabilities, user management capabilities, mailbox management capabilities, client software support capabilities, communication capabilities, and security protection. the following 12 factors are involved: capability, system management capability, version, price, upgrade, and after-sales service.

I. System Support

No matter which computer product you choose, the system's support capabilities must be considered first. The same is true for hardware products and software products. For the mail server, the following three questions should be examined in terms of system support capabilities:

1) server running platform support

For a software server product, its operating platform supports only one platform and two platforms. If a network managed by a network administrator supports the coexistence of multiple operating systems and multiple email servers managed independently, you must consider the convenience of the collaborative work and unified management of each email server, we recommend that you prioritize cross-platform products. Otherwise, you can only consider the products that meet your platform requirements.

2) business processing capability

Some mail server products are often divided into enterprise and standard versions. The prices of the two products are very different. The former is mainly used by group users who have a large number of users and have a large number of businesses to handle, and the latter is used by group users of small and medium sizes.

3) system processing capability

The mail server's system processing capability refers to its ability to process information using the system hardware platform and software platform. For server platforms that support multiple CPUs, some mail servers can set the number of processes in the system, the number of client connections allowed by each process, and the number of threads allowed by each process.

4) Server Load balancer support

In order to meet the needs of user business expansion, some mail server products still have a certain degree of support for multi-server load balancing in the same platform. In this mode, the network administrator can add email servers at any time as the business needs grow. After appropriate system configuration, multiple servers can share the mail service processing work.

Ii. Service Agreement support capability

Email server is an Internet service software product, and various service protocols support many Internet services. When selecting an email server product, the ability to support service protocols is an important indicator to measure the product performance.

There are mainly six network service protocols related to the mail server product:

1) SMTP protocol

SMTP is short for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. This was the first and most widely used Internet Mail Service protocol.

2) POP3 protocol

The POP Protocol is short for the Post Office Protocol. It is a Protocol that allows users to send and receive emails from the mail server. Combined with SMTP, POP3 is currently the most common email service protocol.

3) IMAP4 protocol

IMAP Protocol is short for Internet Message Access Protocol, it provides users with the function of receiving mails from the mail server, server-based information processing, and shared mailbox. After you log on to the mail server, IMAP4 allows you to query emails in multi-segment processing mode. First, you can read only the Messageheader in your email. Then, you can download the specified email or all the emails. IMAP4 retains the mail for the user at one end of the mail server.

4) HTTP and HTML

HTTP is short for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. A Mail Server that supports this Protocol can provide Web-based email sending and receiving services.

5) MIME Protocol

MIME is the abbreviation of Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. As an extension of the SMTP protocol, MIME sets the criteria for transmitting non-text email attachments through the SMTP protocol. At present, the use of MIME has already exceeded the range of email sending and receiving, and has become one of the basic protocols for transmitting multimedia information on the Internet.

6) LDAP protocol

LDAP is short for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. By storing relevant content in a unified directory, the Directory Service provides users with information query methods based on the working methods of customers/servers.

Iii. Multi-mail server support

Multi-mail server support has two meanings: physically supporting multiple email servers to work collaboratively and logically supporting multiple virtual email servers. The latter is also called multi-domain mail service.

Multiple email servers can work collaboratively physically, meaning that this product can build multi-level email services in a complex network environment. In addition to enterprise mail servers, a large organization also allows various departments to create and manage their own department-level mail servers. The enterprise mail server is connected directly to the Internet and to the email servers of various departments. It is the collection node of the vertical mail service.

Multi-domain email service provides email services to multiple organizations or departments that register Internet domain names independently through a physical server. In the outside world, these organizations or departments seem to have their own dedicated email servers. Therefore, it is also called a virtual email server.

4. Other service support capabilities

1) Mail paging service

When receiving an email from a user, the mail server that provides this service can send the email receiving situation or simple content to the recipient's pager according to the sender's requirements.

2) mail to Fax Service

Some email servers also provide options to send emails received by email to the fax machine specified by the recipient according to the sender's requirements.

3) Mail User Group Service

The Mailinglist service, also known as the mail list service, is a network service that communicates special information through email.

4) Network News Service

Network News is an invisible Network of users who share common interests on the Internet.

5) multilingual services

Some mail servers also provide multi-language service support capabilities, allowing administrators and users to enter custom text information in multiple languages, and automatically select the appropriate language to provide services according to the user's country characteristics.