The CityU's Choice of Email System

 

Dennis Ho

Editor's notes:

Since the launch of Eudora Pro in January this year, a series of free staff courses and small talks were conducted as part of our implementation exercise. As a result, more than 300 users attended the courses. However, it was discovered that a minority of users still have hesitations in making the move. In view of this, we sincerely hope that we can convince everyone that Eudora Pro is the best choice for CityU. The following summary report is based on a most thorough study and testing conducted by our email task force with members drawn from different sections within the department.

The task force was formed in May 1996. Its mission is to find a windows-based email system that is best suited in our environment, in particular, one that would fit in an enterprise backbone model as opposed to a LAN-based model. Taking this into considerations together with months of hard work, the task force concluded in late September 1996 that Eudora Pro was the best among its competitors at the time. Hope you will find this article useful and informational. Enjoy!

Introduction

With the above-mentioned basic requirements in mind, an email system configuration will be chosen according to the criteria listed in the following section. A list of terms and abbreviations are given at the end of the article.

Selection Criteria

• The email client must be able to run under Windows 95, the new standard windows environment, and preferably on other platforms such as Windows 3.1, DOS and also on UNIX workstations and Macintosh if possible.
• The email system must be able to run under TCP/IP⁵ networking protocol.
• The email system must support standards to the Internet, namely SMTP⁶ or SMTP gateway.
• The system must be scaleable such that more users can be added easily.
• It should be flexible enough to support more users from different servers.
• The system must be manageable with central point of administration.
• Ideally, the system should be interoperable with other email systems.
• It should be compliant to new email standards such as MIME⁷, OLE⁸, MAPI⁹ etc.
• The operating system on which the email system resides should have backup and restore utilities.
• The email client may run on network version or local version.
• The email client can be accessed with easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI).
• It is preferable that the system can support message routing.
• Messages can be downloaded from the server.
• Preferably, the system should handle multiple folders.
• It will be more favourable if the system can support public and private address books.
• If the system can support remote connections, it will be an additional asset.
• The system must be stable and efficient.

Email systems from two different categories were shortlisted for further studies. They are proprietary email system and open standard email system respectively. Evaluation of systems from these two categories was done on products that were available during the testing period and may not be the latest version currently on the market.

Proprietary Email System versus Open Standard Email System

At the time of study (between May and September 1996), Microsoft Exchange Server 4.0 could only run on a single OS platform, namely Windows NT. The choice of hardware was fairly limited. The Exchange client mainly ran on Windows 95 and Windows 3.1. The system management and troubleshooting of the Exchange Server required experienced administrators. The mail delivery time taken up by the Exchange Server was fairly long and the software occasionally hanged during our evaluation. The GUI may not be user-friendly enough to some novice users in such a way that some of the buttons are quite difficult to understand. The product did not fulfil our requirements during the testing period.

Lotus Notes is a workgroup package that also features email. Both the email server and client can run on multiple platforms. Though very scaleable and adaptable to custom infrastructure, the administration of the email users and messages is highly dependent on the proprietary database system. It would be more difficult for in-house support in case of data corruption. The workgroup functionality of Lotus Notes is strong but it requires a lot of programming to build customized applications. It is not considered as the best solution to our targeted enterprise backbone model.

Due to the cons in proprietary email systems, more emphasis was put on the investigation of various open standard email systems to fit into our enterprise backbone model. In short, open standard email systems conform to world-wide email-specific client-server protocol standards and information exchange with other different programs or databases is thus possible. Two most popular of such protocols are IMAP4¹⁰ and POP3¹¹.

IMAP4 allows the client to connect online with the server which means that the client will be notified instantly when new mail arrives on the server. Multiple folders are supported. Nevertheless, the selection of IMAP4 client was very limited at the time of evaluation and Simeon was the only choice. Its GUI is fairly crude. Further studies showed that Simeon is sometimes slow and not that easy to use. The very many features provided by Simeon require lots of settings which may confuse most users. Since there is no other candidate ready for testing, consideration of IMAP4 was disregarded even though IMAP4 is potentially capable of handling more complicated email tasks.

POP3 seems to be an ideal protocol standard to follow. Why? It has been around in the market for quite a period of time. Lots of clients are available in the form of freeware, shareware and sophisticated sold packages. Its main advantage is that it is supported on a wide variety of OS platforms such as OpenVMS, UNIX and Windows NT. Since all our existing email accounts reside within OpenVMS, the account information can be reused and administrative effort can be greatly minimized. The same mailbox can be used through Pathworks Mail (our original email client) and POP3 service, thus smoothing the transition process. This implies that users have the option of reading their mail as before even after the new email system is launched. Since POP3 supports TCP/IP, only PMDF email backbone package is required to run on OpenVMS.

Amongst the several dozens of POP3 clients, Exchange client 4.0 (now known as Windows Messaging) with Internet Mail transport, Netscape Mail 2.01, Microsoft Internet Mail Beta 3.0, Eudora Light 1.54 and Eudora Pro 2.2 were carefully selected for evaluation. To choose a perfect candidate out of the list had not been an easy task. The evaluation was only based on what was offered at the time. Readers are therefore reminded that the evaluation summary provided in the next section only reflects our findings during the testing period between May and September 1996.

Evaluation Summary of POP3 Clients

Netscape Mail is tightly integrated with Netscape browser which already exists on our network. Though the GUI is not too difficult to understand, it provides neither spell-checking nor inbox filter. Only one setup file is supported per machine. Individual message on email server cannot be deleted. Address book does not handle distribution list. It also lacks some encoding and decoding methods such as uuencode and binhex, making it an incomplete solution.

The version of Microsoft Internet Mail tested is a beta release. It provides good GUI, allows spell-checking and control on the server side. Uuencode encoding and decoding method is supported. However, it does not support MAPI. Since it is an add-on to Internet Explorer 3.0 or above which is not our default Internet browser, a big overhead will be incurred by users who must have Internet Explorer as a prerequisite to run Microsoft Internet Mail. The installation of Internet Mail will be more complicated. In addition, it does hang sometimes during our evaluation. As a result, Internet Mail is not chosen.

Two versions of Eudora are available : Eudora Light and Eudora Pro. Eudora Light is free but it is not supported by the mother company because of its freeware nature. It misses some advanced features like spell checker, inbox assistant (filters), drag and drop attachment, MAPI support and message handling utilities on the server side which are essential for day-to-day use. The Eudora Light version does not support uuencode encoding and decoding method neither, bringing inconvenience to users who use both Pathworks Mail and Eudora. A separate encoder and decoder will then be needed if a user running Eudora Light wants to communicate with another user using Pathworks Mail. Eudora Pro, on the other hand, contains all the features missing in all of the email clients discussed above. Even though Eudora Light may coexist with Eudora Pro, Eudora Pro has a different GUI than Eudora Light. Taking into considerations the training effort involved for both Eudora Pro and Eudora Light, it is advisable to adopt Eudora Pro as the university-wide email client to ensure functionality and to maintain consistency.

Conclusion

¹ Email system consists of Email server and Email client. Server will handle all mail administration and transmission, whereas client manages the user-interface portion.
²DECNET is a networking protocol developed by Digital Equipment Corporation.
³PMDF is a suite of electronic messaging software from Innosoft International Inc.
⁴See Note 1.
⁵TCP/IP stands for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol.
⁶SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol.
⁷MIME stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions.
⁸OLE is the Object Linking and Embedding.
⁸MAPI is the Messaging Application Programmer Interface which is a standard designed by Microsoft for messaging.
¹⁰IMAP4 is the Internet Mail Access Protocol Ver. 4.
¹¹POP3 is the Post Office Protocol Version 3.

Computing Services Centre City University of Hong Kong ccnetcom@cityu.edu.hk