Dotnetpanel Forums

Hi all, Can someone, who has used both MailEnable & SmarterMail (preferable the Pro / Enterprise editions) tell me which one Upto now, we've used SmarterMail 5 as it came bundled with DotNetPanel and never really saw the need to upgrade to SM 6 or SM 7. But now we're moving over to Enkompass, which includes a Lite version of SM 5, which is a bit outdated for a new product. We've had many problems with SmarterMail, but this could be due to DotNetPanel's bugs as well, I'm not sure. I have considered MailEnable as an alternative due to the high price of both MailEnable and their support. The community support forum isn't the best in the industry either So now I installed MailEnable Standard Edition to see how it works, and it seems fairly simple to use. The only real advantage I see of SmarterMail is that the webmail interface looks a bit more professional. BUT, should that really warrant the extra cost? Surely someone logs-in to check mail, not to marvel at a nice-looking web interface? From a normal IMAP / POP3 / SMTP point of view, both look & function the same to the client. So I don't think clients will pack-up and leave cause the webmail interface changed a bit? But, if anyone has extensively compared these 2 on a functionality level, then please share your experiences with me. I would appreciate some feedback on this. SmarterMail 7 Pro = $1099 (unlimited domain, to compare with MailEnable) MailEnable 5 Pro = $349 SmarterMail 7 Enterprise = $1399 (unlimited) MailEnable 5 Enterprise = $699 MailEnable 5 Enterprise Premium = $1098 (same price as SmarterMail Pro) Is the extra $700 really worth it?

Some of my key factors for selecting SmarterMail are:

* Feature rich but relative clean and user friendly web mail

* Web Services for automation

* Modern technology. SmarterMail is a pure managed application implemented with .NET 2.0 and MailEnable is mainly from the Visual Studio 6 generation using COM (except WebMail which is ASP.NET 1.1).

 The two products are really hard to compare because their so different.  SmarterMail is used not only in small businesses and small hosting companies like mailenable, but it is also in some of the largest hosting companies in the industry due to its stability and scalability.  Although mailenable has many features, the enhanced aspects of SmarterMail which include: Intrusion Detection, the multitude of SPAM integration options, very refined web interfaces for administrators and end-users, outlook and pocket pc integration, reporting and many others items are significantly different or in some cases don't exist in mailenable.