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Birchmore Communications Group Relies on Ipswitch IMail Server for Dependable, Scalable and Cost-effective Email Service
Company: Birchmore Communications Group
Industry: Internet Service Provider
Business Challenge: The company needed an email solution that met the budget requirements of a startup, but would scale easily as Birchmore grew.
Outcome: Ipswitch IMail Server delivers reliable, efficient email service to thousands of Birchmore users at hundreds of client domains. Advanced anti-spam, anti-virus and Webmail capabilities provide additional value to clients, while keeping administrative overhead low.
With offices in Tampa and Orlando, Florida, Birchmore Communications Group provides web hosting, web design, search engine marketing, e-commerce and technical consulting. As an ISP that is committed to providing affordable, reliable service to its customers, Birchmore relies on multiple T3 connections from several of the best Internet backbone providers in the U.S. To further ensure its reliability, Birchmore uses Ipswitch IMail Server to provide efficient and dependable email service to its customers.
As Director of Information Technology for Birchmore, Tommy Orndorf III takes pride in his company’s ability to consistently deliver outstanding Internet service. He notes, “We’ve had less than 10 minutes of downtime in almost five years.” IMail Server, he adds, has played a key role in Birchmore’s record of reliability. “IMail is the number one most-used application within our company. It is the heart of everything we offer. We’ve been running IMail on the same server from day one and never once had an application problem with the server, ever.”
Thousands of Users, Hundreds of Domains, One Server
Five years ago, when Birchmore was getting started, Orndorf was looking for an email server that would fit the budget of a startup, but had the power to support the thousands of users that Birchmore would serve as it expanded. Orndorf chose IMail Server for its simplicity, affordability and scalability. He explains, “When we started out, we wanted to serve email for the sites that we host as an ISP. At the time we brought in IMail Server we had five sites, and now we have over 2,500 live sites, of which we are providing 1,300 with email service. Our IMail Server is serving approximately 15,000 individual mail accounts and that number is growing every day. It easily handles 200,000 messages and more a day.”
Anti-Spam, Anti-Virus, and WebMail Capabilities Add Value
IMail Server provides a range of powerful capabilities that Birchmore has leveraged to add value for its clients, including anti-spam and anti-virus technology and a customizable WebMail interface.
Orndorf recalls, “Spam was a horrible problem. It was clogging up our users’ boxes and costing me a lot of time.” The situation improved dramatically when the company began using IMail Server’s anti-spam technology – an upgrade Birchmore received free with its IMail Server service agreement. “Once we installed IMail Server’s anti-spam system, it cut the spam down by about 90 percent. We use several different filters – phrase lists, word lists, Bayesian statistical filters, the whole nine yards. I have users that were getting 120 spams a day, and now they might get three a day.”
Anti-virus support is another IMail Server feature that simultaneously solves a problem for Birchmore’s clients, and reduces administrative overhead for its staff. “I like IMail’s anti-virus because it uses Symantec’s LiveUpdate, which runs automatically and provides real time updates. Since we’ve been using it we haven’t had a single issue with a virus with any of our clients.”
Of all IMail Server’s features, its WebMail interface may be the most popular among Birchmore users. Orndorf explains, “All of our users have WebMail access. We created a completely customized WebMail interface using the IMail Killer WebMail add-on. Our users love it. It is an extremely heavily used application – we have from 200 to 300 people using it at any give time.”
Key Business Benefits
In addition to technical benefits such as scalability, performance and security, Orndorf reports that IMail Server has provided Birchmore with significant business benefits as well, including a low total cost of ownership and a satisfied customer base. He notes, “One of the biggest benefits of IMail Server is its ease of use. It is simple, easy to set up, configure and get going”. Orndorf continues, “Another key benefit is reliability. We have had it running for five years and never had a single problem with it. It’s hard to put a price on having something that is this reliable, that works this well for clients. IMail Server has easily paid for itself five times over by performing so well for so many years.”
Orndorf is confident that IMail Server will handle -- and even contribute to -- Birchmore’s continuing rapid growth. He concludes, “We’ve almost tripled our business in the past two years, and the resource utilization on the IMail Server machine is never above three percent. I will probably need more T1 circuits before I need to add another IMail server. I have no plans to ever change IMail Server. It simply works. That’s the number one thing – it always works.”
About IMail Server
IMail Server is used by more than 3,000 ISPs worldwide. Ipswitch, the first to market with a high quality, commercial mail server for Windows NT and the first to incorporate Web Messaging and comprehensive anti-spamming capabilities, continues to innovate and lead the NT-based ISP market by meeting the growing demand for high quality messaging products that support open, Internet standards.
