* Paul Mansfield (paulm@???) [990323 09:42]:
> JustFYI.
>
> Just received a blurb on an email appliance, said to solve all your mobile
> messaging needs. Details at http://www.mirapoint.com
I had a chance to see this box at LISA in Boston last year.
> I guess they've taken the idea that NetApp have exploited so well in their
> toaster and proxy/cache engines, and produced a box for email. It's got web
> mail, pop & imap, all in one plug-and-go box.
That was precisely the line they used at the product launch.
> They compare their system to "freeware" (specifically sendmail+qpopper, with
> NFS for spool space). I guess therefore they've not quite surveyed the freeware
> marketplace.
Actually, the people who did the coding have been involved in supporting and
teaching Sendmail for quite a few years, so it's not as though they just
chose it 6 months ago without surveying. Hal Pomerantz did some work on it,
but I'm not sure to what extent. Hal (from what I picked up) knows Eric
Allman pretty well.
> They have their own OS and application software, said to fit on a single floppy
> disk. Hardware spool is RAID-5. CPU is Intel.
My big beef with this box was it's lack of configurability. i.e. they took
something which can be configured in many ways, and dumbed it down for the
toaster type of box. Based upon that tactic, I doubt Exim would have given
them anything new -- they would still be removing or ignoring 80% of the
functionality it provides.
> I guess they're aiming to steal market share from Intermail (www.software.com)
I'm not sure... they don't have cluster failover yet. From what I remember,
they want to go with that, but they are waiting for sales to generate
capital to develop it.
--
j.
James FitzGibbon (JF647) james@???
EHLO Solutions Voice/Fax (416)410-0100
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