The last of my posts is going to be short and sweet as this fairly minor feature is more of a visual one. Simple traffic graphs are now visible in the WebAdmin iterface to allow administrators to see a graphical overview of the load on the mail server. Choosing "Traffic" or "Mailbox" within the Status Menu of WebAdmin now shows a graphical view of basic email patterns, top users and other key statistics. This information can be exported as an image or PDF file via the Export button:

As the name suggests, this simple feature allows MDaemon's IMAP server to honour the IMAP compression mode which significantly decreases the amount of data that needs to be transferred during a client to server IMAP session. Typical compression ranges from 50-90% depending on the data being transmitted but the overall increase in performance is undoubtedly beneficial. Unfortunately, not all IMAP clients support IMAP compression so be sure to check your specific client for details. The native Outlook IMAP session doesn't in fact, however ALT-N have addressed this by adding support in the Outlook Connector Client.

Alt-N idea enginesThose of you already familiar with MDaemon and Texas-based developer Alt-N Technologies, will know that feedback from customers has always played a pivotal role in the way their products evolve. The MDaemon beta community has been fundamental to this process but as we look towards the future and the imminent release of version 13, they're opening this up and making it simple for anyone to contribute ideas and suggestions via their Idea Engine.

In this next MDaemon 13 Beta post I want to look at one completely new feature and another that's more of an enhancement to an existing feature. Lets start with the new feature...

Document sharing

If you're a WorldClient user who often sends out the same set of files, product brochures and price lists for example - keeping a local copy on every PC you use can be a chore.

It's generally accepted that a message size of around 20MB is too large to send via email, and you'll find in lots of cases that mail servers will actually refuse to accept files that are this big. There are, however, many servers that don't limit the message size, which means if you try and share that high-quality 150MB video of your cat performing Dancing Queen, both your network and the recipient's will work overtime trying to deal with it.

The newest version of MDaemon will be available for download on Wednesday, September 5th. The new release sees a number of new features to help IT administrators and end users alike, such as:
  • Message ticketing support
  • Consolidated Mobile Device Management (MDM) interface and ActiveSync policies
  • Hijacked account detection
  • Document sharing, drag & drop attachments and custom logos in WorldClient
  • Traffic compression to improve Outlook Connector performance
View the PDF briefing document here for more information. As soon as it's available you'll be able to download the latest version of the installer from our web site here.

Another week, another set of new features to look at in the beta version of MDaemon version 13. Let's look at one of the more useful business features of MDaemon, the ability to capture email arriving on group email address such as sales@ and support@, and storing them directly into public folders. This feature allows a group of sales or support staff to monitor the public folders and take ownership of the emails, sharing the workload.

One of the more common customers support calls i get relates to MDaemon suddenly sending vast amounts of spam email. This floods the outbound Internet connection and everything crawls to a halt. Secondary to this the server's public IP address can get listed on various external SMTP blacklists which the customer then has to request removal from.

So on to part 2 of my look at the new MDaemon 13 beta... I mentioned ActiveSync policies in my last post, well version 13 also sees the addition of one extra small, but very nice feature, in the ability to simplify the self sign-up process for mobile devices using the Autodiscover process. By removing the necessity to know the public DNS name or IP address of your MDaemon server, all a user now needs to connect their mobile device is their email address and password.

Over the last few weeks I've been experimenting with the latest Beta editions of MDaemon version 13 and thought it'd be beneficial to share some of the great new up and coming features you can expect to see in the release. Just before I wet your appetite with the first of them - don't forget, if you're interested in getting involved in the MDaemon beta test process you can apply to join the community by registering here.