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My Own E-mail

What does it take to succeed in the competitive Internet e-mail space, if you’re not one of the original 800-pound gorillas? An innovative offering – in this case, quirky, personalized domain names – and a spam-proof, dependable, scalable, easy-to-manage server.

Quantum Computer Services, founded in 1992 and headquartered in Slidell, La., wanted to get out of the Web-site design business and carve out a niche in the popular consumer Web-messaging arena. With clever domain names (mostwanted.com, freeandsingle.com, bullsfan.com) and an IMail Server from Ipswitch, Inc., it blossomed into My Own Email ("E-mail with personality"), now one of the fastest growing companies providing e-mail services on the Internet.

"We wanted to get more actively involved in the Internet and concluded that e-mail was the number one user application. So we set out to make a unique product to capitalize on that market," said Scott Polk, administrator at My Own Email. "It would have been impossible without IMail Server."

In essence, My Own Email succeeded by building a spam-proof engine around Ipswitch’s IMail Server – the Windows NT alternative to a UNIX e-mail server for small and medium-sized businesses and ISPs. IMail easily handles messages for hundreds of domain names, basically manages itself and is scalable to accommodate the spectacular growth Polk and his colleagues hoped for. With a little help from Ipswitch, My Own Email was also able to quickly and easily customize the user interface, branding it with the company’s identity.

Ipswitch, based in Lexington, Mass., introduced IMail Server in 1995. The latest version includes IMAP4 and LDAP support, anti-spamming features, more Web administration capabilities, Web messaging, and e-mail-to-pager capabilities.

"We built a Web-based reader around the IMail engine so that people can use any Web browser to check their e-mail, whether they are at school, at the office or at home," said Polk. "They can choose to either leave their mail on our servers and check it from any place they have access to a Web browser, or they can have it forwarded to another e-mail account."

The popularity of My Own Email, which went live in the spring of 1997 and is doubling in size every three months, stems both from the convenience for users of the free service and the offbeat domain names that make URL addresses stand out. Customers can choose from among nine general categories (music, TV, movies, funny, attitude, sexy, celebrities, sports or cyber) and two miscellaneous categories. Sample names include "imtoosexy.com." "antisocial.com, " "yada-yada.com," "the18th.com," "netexecutive.com" or the always popular "itookmyprozac.com."

"Users come to our site looking for an alternative e-mail address that matches their personality and can choose from more than 200 domain names, which is what sets us apart from our competition. They run the gamut from young kids who use the different accounts from school so they can have their own e-mail on the school computer, to people who just don’t like their office address for some reason," said Polk. "Most, of course, just do it for fun."

When Polk’s folks set out to architect the My Own Email system, Polk said, they knew they wanted to build it on an NT platform ("We’re Windows people!"), but needed to shop around for the most appropriate server. After a thorough survey of what the market had to offer, the Ipswitch offering was chosen for its unmatched overall capabilities, he said, but most importantly because of its ease of scalability.

"Scalability was very big for us because we knew we’d get to the point where our machine could no longer handle the amount of users we had," he said of the system, which is a collection of networked Pentium II-class PCs. "We wanted to be able to easily move to another machine without interrupting our service, and with the Ipswitch server there’s never been a problem accommodating our growth."

Also attractive, Polk said, was IMail Server’s built-in message-relay controls to prevent unauthorized mailings, i.e., spam, from passing through IMail as a gateway or relay. "We really liked the security they have in place to help us avoid misuse of our equipment and our bandwidth by spammers," he said.

On a day-to-day basis, it is the multi-domain support capability and easy management that make the IMail Server especially appreciated in Polk’s shop. "IMail’s ability to support these domains is important to us because we can maintain all of these domain names on a single interface," he said. "And they basically run themselves. The only reason we have to go in and make changes is if we’re taking a user out or we’re updating to a new server. It requires very little actual management."

In fact, My Own Email has leveraged the IMail Server to automate the addition of new users so that Polk’s people don’t need to get involved. "We get thousands of new users every single day and the registration process takes care of itself," said Chris Terrebonne, Webmaster. Taking advantage of a command-line interface on the Ipswitch server, new users just click on the service’s Web site (http://www.myownemail.com) and sign on.

Another IMail Server feature Polk’s customers appreciate is the auto-responder capability, which sends an automated response in reply to incoming e-mail, "letting people know you’re on vacation or home from school on break or whatever," he said. "This is a very popular feature among our users." As the administrator, Polk also appreciates how the IMail Server can limit the number of messages users store in their accounts.

Looking ahead, Polk and company – now with hundreds of thousands of users and anticipating many more, with only word-of-mouth publicity to drive it – figure the market will only grow and the IMail Servers will keep up with demand.

"From the start, the IMail Server allowed us to set ourselves apart from our competitors," said Polk. "Now we feel confident that IMail will help us handle the millions and millions of e-mail accounts we’re expecting to come in some day."

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