Existing users, 
 Kerio MailServer - 6.7.2Email and collaboration server for SMB. |
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Feedback Summary:
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| Overall Rating: | Not rated (0.0) | Features: | Not rated (0.0) | Support: | Not rated (0.0) |
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Featured Reviews
Decent, but not for complex deployments 
- Version: 6.7p1, 6/8/2009 08:49AM PST
(1 of 1 users found this comment useful)
billmatthews
Highly Recommended over Other Mac Choices - Version: 6.6.2, 5/12/2009 04:51PM PST
Mr. Shaffer
I have just finished moving over 16 email accounts from my cobbled together Mac OS X Leopard Server on an Xserve to running Kerio on a Mac Mini. Other than the obvious difference in throughput (Xserve vs. Mac Mini), I am very, very happy with this product.
I had to learn so much to bring everything up to snuf on the OS X's setup, that I ended up ditching the GUI in Server Admin and only hand code all of the Postfix configuration and have an extensive Perl script for learning/unlearning Spam through SpamAssassin. I works great, but it was not easy.
Then... I got Kerio. What a breeze, and backed up with good documentation (even if the writer's appear to have English as a second language at times)! Of course now I know what I am doing, coming from OS X Server's world, but that makes it all the more clear how much more 'Mac' Kerio's implementation is than Apple's. Apple should buy Kerio, then create an integrated Office/Exchange(Kerio) suite for the business world. That would bury Microsoft, whose real stranglehold on the big business sector is Exchange.
Back to Kerio. My only big beef is there was no easy way to teach the Bayesian SpamAssassin filter like with a normal SpamAssassin install. So, it is only set to auto-learn, and I couldn't move my existing SA database over with its 3 year's worth of learnings, which has led to more spam for the moment.
The webmail client is very good and polished (much better than OS X's venerable SquirrelMail), but lacks real email interface items, like 'redirect', 'forward as attachment', and there is not way to 'blacklist' with SpamAssassin as a webmail user, only as an admin.
The administrator console application is great and well thought-out. I use it on my Mac Pro at work and another one on my Mac at home to admin the Mini. No problems so far.
I highly recommend this for small to medium business with limited resources, especially since you can get the groupware benefits without buying the full version of Entourage for everyone like we did (the Home/Office version does not have Exchange support, though works via IMAP just fine). You can skip Microsoft and use a mixture of Apple's software, but I have not tried this.
I also recommend getting DNSEnabler to quickly setup a DNS server on the same Mac you run Kerio. This way, any laptops can access Kerio directly when at work, then remotely through secure channels when outside work. Easy as pie with Kerio's service setup. I also installed a cheap GoDaddy SSL certificate (check the docs on that one, especially the install of intermediate certs). Works great, even with the Microsoft products.
Larry
I had to learn so much to bring everything up to snuf on the OS X's setup, that I ended up ditching the GUI in Server Admin and only hand code all of the Postfix configuration and have an extensive Perl script for learning/unlearning Spam through SpamAssassin. I works great, but it was not easy.
Then... I got Kerio. What a breeze, and backed up with good documentation (even if the writer's appear to have English as a second language at times)! Of course now I know what I am doing, coming from OS X Server's world, but that makes it all the more clear how much more 'Mac' Kerio's implementation is than Apple's. Apple should buy Kerio, then create an integrated Office/Exchange(Kerio) suite for the business world. That would bury Microsoft, whose real stranglehold on the big business sector is Exchange.
Back to Kerio. My only big beef is there was no easy way to teach the Bayesian SpamAssassin filter like with a normal SpamAssassin install. So, it is only set to auto-learn, and I couldn't move my existing SA database over with its 3 year's worth of learnings, which has led to more spam for the moment.
The webmail client is very good and polished (much better than OS X's venerable SquirrelMail), but lacks real email interface items, like 'redirect', 'forward as attachment', and there is not way to 'blacklist' with SpamAssassin as a webmail user, only as an admin.
The administrator console application is great and well thought-out. I use it on my Mac Pro at work and another one on my Mac at home to admin the Mini. No problems so far.
I highly recommend this for small to medium business with limited resources, especially since you can get the groupware benefits without buying the full version of Entourage for everyone like we did (the Home/Office version does not have Exchange support, though works via IMAP just fine). You can skip Microsoft and use a mixture of Apple's software, but I have not tried this.
I also recommend getting DNSEnabler to quickly setup a DNS server on the same Mac you run Kerio. This way, any laptops can access Kerio directly when at work, then remotely through secure channels when outside work. Easy as pie with Kerio's service setup. I also installed a cheap GoDaddy SSL certificate (check the docs on that one, especially the install of intermediate certs). Works great, even with the Microsoft products.
Larry
6.5.2 Adds iPhone ActiveSync - Version: 6.5.2, 7/15/2008 09:27AM PST
mayall
ActiveSync for the iPhone works properly. The iPod Touch also works if you allow unsupported devices. In the following section of the mailserver.cfg file, change the value from 0 to 1:
<table name="MobileSync">
<variable name="AllowUnsupportedDevices">1</variable>
HTML and enclosures are not supported with an Exchange account. If you need these features on your iPhone, you can use an Exchange account for calendar and contacts and use an iMAP account for email.
Kerio's mail server is a terrific rock solid server that is well supported.
<table name="MobileSync">
<variable name="AllowUnsupportedDevices">1</variable>
HTML and enclosures are not supported with an Exchange account. If you need these features on your iPhone, you can use an Exchange account for calendar and contacts and use an iMAP account for email.
Kerio's mail server is a terrific rock solid server that is well supported.
For more complex deployments though, it starts to underperform compared to its counterparts. In particular, there's virtually no server-side scripting at all. As such if you want to set up any kind of server-wide rules, you'll generally need to pre-process all of your incoming mail. The logging also leaves much to be desired. If you need to track the progress of a given message through the server, you're limited to just logging the arrival of the message, you can't really see what happens once it's accepted.
One of my biggest pet peeves is the rigidity of the configuration controls. As one example, if you have an organization that has multiple brands and, as such, multiple domain names, you're going to have a lot of trouble setting up a group address that spans these domains. You essentially have to create a dummy account (which eats up license seats btw) in each domain that forwards to a group address in each of the other domains because the interface doesn't allow you to add an email address to a group--you can only add a registered account that is a member in the same domain. You can, however, add an email address as a forwarding address for an account, hence the above workaround does the trick. As well, a group address cannot have another group as a member so there's no grouping of groups available without a workaround either.
These are just a few of the examples of trying to figure out how to do things that used to be easy--a practice I found myself doing too often with Kerio server. As such, for a solution that's priced in the same ballpark as some other major players now, I can't recommend it for organizations with complex needs.