VPOP3 Features

New Web Mail

VPOP3 can has a new Web Mail interface which is more like a standard desktop client for better functionality

CalDAV support

VPOP3 has CalDAV support to allow people to access calendars on the server via a CalDAV client

Calendar sharing

VPOP3 Enterprise allows calendar sharing using CalDAV

Address book sharing

VPOP3 Enterprise allows address book sharing in Webmail

New Web Admin pages

VPOP3 can has a much improved Web settings console with AJAX and other dynamic features

Better back-end database

VPOP3 now uses PostgreSQL as the back-end database giving better reliability and performance, especially on busy servers or VPOP3 Enterprise

Supports Windows Vista/7/2008

VPOP3 can now be run on Windows Vista, 7, 2008 as well as earlier verions

Add Windows Home Server Support

VPOP3 can now be run on Windows Home Server with a console addin to allow basic administrator from the WHS console.

Allow Webmail/IMAP4 access to a mailbox at the same time

In previous versions of VPOP3 if a user was accessing their mailbox using IMAP4, they could not access it using Webmail at the same time. Now they can.

Add DomainKeys support

DomainKeys is a way of verifying that the sender of a message is who they say they are.

Blacklisted and whitelisted words for spam filter

Earlier versions of VPOP3 had an address blacklist and whitelist, now you can add words to a blacklist/whitelist for the spam filter to block outright messages containing certain words, or to let messages containing other words through.

Add support for multiple POP3/SMTP server configurations

VPOP3 can now have several POP3 and/or SMTP server configurations. For instance, you may want a SSL encrypted SMTP server for local users using Outlook, but an unencrypted/TLS server for an incoming SMTP feed.

Add support for SSL/TLS connections from VPOP3 to ISPs

More and more ISPs are starting to require encrypted connections to their servers (eg GMail and others). Previously you needed to use a third party utility called STUNNEL to achieve this, but now support is built into VPOP3.

Add support for SSL connections to VPOP3 from clients as well as TLS connections

Some email clients like Outlook and Outlook Express only support 'SSL' encrypted connections, not the more modern TLS encrypted connections, so VPOP3 now supports encrypted connections to these popular email clients as well.

Lots of improvements to LAN forwarding

Too many to mention, but if you use LAN forwarding, this is definitely worth an upgrade.

Improve Webmail support for non-ASCII character sets

Webmail now supports more (if not all) character sets, not just Western European.

Support multiple languages in Webmail

Webmail now supports multiple languages (Currently German, Spanish and English) in its user interface.

Improve Webmail layout

Webmail now has a fully scrollable message list with a 'preview pane' (like many standalone email clients) to be more user friendly.

Improve MX sender to allow more configurable retry periods

You can now have VPOP3 retry message sending at different periods depending on how many times it has tried the message before, eg you may want the first retry to be after 10 minutes, then after 30 minutes, then every 60 minutes thereafter.

Lots of spam filter improvements

Support for PostgreSQL database for some back-end databases to improve performance on loaded servers

PostgreSQL is a powerful database which can handle lots of concurrent accesses far better than the standard built-in database which VPOP3 uses (SQLite), so on busy servers using PostgreSQL instead can give massive performance improvements.

Have option not to archive spam

The archive facility in VPOP3 can use a lot of disk space, especially if it is archiving spam as well, so this option lets you stop VPOP3 archiving spam. If a message is released from the quarantine it will be added to the archive as well.

Automatically release messages from the quarantine when an address is added to the spamfilter whitelist

If an address is added to the spamfilter whitelist, VPOP3 will automatically release any other messages from the same sender.

Allow all spam quarantine reports to be sent to a particular user instead of the original recipient

This can be useful if you want a single person to be in charge of checking through quarantined messages for any which were incorrectly quarantined.

Allow anonymous viewing of quarantined messages

If this is enabled, a user can click from a quarantine summary report to view and release the quarantined message without having to log into Webmail first.

Allow attachment filtering to be enabled/disabled for different messages

You can specify rules to say whether attachment filtering should apply to a message, eg based on sender, recipient, subject etc.

SMTP Greylisting

Greylisting is a common approach for reducing incoming spam on a direct incoming SMTP feed.

(Requires either VPOP3 Enterprise or an active spam filter subscription)

Allow spam not to be forwarded to remote addresses

If VPOP3 receives spam, allow it ignore any assistant/forward settings for that message.

Scriptable Routing

A Lua script can be used to add complex message routing rules - eg only forward messages between certain times etc.

Usenet/NNTP Server

An extra-cost basic NNTP client/server is available in VPOP3 to centrally download Usenet messages and allow your users to access them without having to each download them individually. This allows administrators to restrict which Usenet groups are received by users.

Spam Filter Updates

An optional subscription to automatically receive updates to the spam filter is available. VPOP3 will periodically download the new filter definitions and use them to check future downloaded messages. If you don't have this, then the spam filter will still work, but you may need to maintain it yourself to detect new tricks used by spammers

Spam Quarantine

Detected spam can optionally be placed into a quarantine. A daily report is sent to the user listing all the quarantined email, and the user can release it from the quarantine if desired. Messages are automatically purged from the quarantine after 30 days

SMTP Rule, Download Rule & Access Restrictions Editors

In previous versions of VPOP3 these useful features required entering 'text commands' into a 'script'. This has now been simplified by having a user friendly editor to generate the scripts for the administrator (the manual editing method is still available if preferred by experienced administrators).

WebMail Improvements

The WebMail feature built into VPOP3 is improved with such things as a spell checker, rich-text editor, and other usability improvements.

Mailbox Quotas

The administrator can define quotas for users, with warning emails sent to the user and/or administrator at various levels. The offending users can also be prevented from sending outgoing mail if the quota is over-used by an administrator specified amount

Duplicate Checking

VPOP3 can track which messages it has downloaded and sent to which users to try to prevent the same message being sent to the same person more than once. This can be useful with several setups where VPOP3 downloads mail from several different ISP mailboxes and using different methods (eg both POP3 and SMTP)

Email Archiving

You can tell VPOP3 to keep a copy of all incoming and outgoing messages in an 'archive' store for you. This can either be on the VPOP3 computer itself, or on a network accessed drive. This archive is searchable by items such as message subject, sender, date, attachments etc, and lets you view the found messages and other associated messages, as well as being able to move them into a specified user's mailbox to download to a normal email client. Messages can later be transferred out of the main archive store to a backup medium, such as a removeable hard disk or written to a CD, whilst still being left in the main index to allow subsequent searches to still find the messages in question and be told which backup medium they are on.

SPAM Filtering

VPOP3 now has a powerful built-in spam filtering script language capability. VPOP3 comes with a pre-configured script to perform many spam filtering tasks, such as real-time DNS blacklists, bayesian filtering, regular expression checks, black/white lists etc. This catches much unwanted email 'out of the box', whilst being configurable to perform further spam filtering or content filtering tasks as required.

SSL Support

VPOP3 Enterprise supports SSL in the WebMail/Admin service, as well as the 'STARTLS' commands in the POP3/SMTP and IMAP4 services. This allows email to be encrypted as it is passed over the local network preventing unauthorised users from using 'packet sniffers' to access other users' email.

SMTP Server Scripting

You can now create scripts (using a variant of the simple to learn 'Lua' programming language') to implement advanced behaviour within the SMTP server component of VPOP3. This allows you to add many facilities to VPOP3 which otherwise might not be possible. For instance, you can perform checks based on the sender's IP address (for instance to implement SPF (Sender Policy Framework) checks - an implementation of this is available for download) or to modify message routing based on email contents or attachments.

POP3 Download Scripting

You can create scripts (using a variant of the Lua programming language) to process messages after they have been downloaded by VPOP3 from an ISP POP3 account. This allows you to implement advanced behaviour such as re-routing or modifying messages based on their message content, or attachments.

Password strength checking scripting

You can create scripts (using a variant of the Lua programming language) to check the strength of a password based on your requirements. (Example scripts ara available for download).

Optional VRFY and EXPN support

The VRFY and EXPN SMTP commands allow another mail server to check email addresses are valid before using them, and to resolve aliases. Usually these commands are disabled for security reasons, but VPOP3 allows you to indicate that certain mail servers (eg other internal mail servers or spam filtering can use these commands whilst other, untrusted, mail servers can't.

Instant Messaging

Using VPOP3 along with the VPOP3 status monitor (free with VPOP3) you can easily implement a local Instant Messaging facility on your network so local users can quickly send short messages to each other.

Secure authentication transmission methods

VPOP3 supports secure email account authentication methods both when communicating with local email clients and when communicating with your ISP (if your ISP supports these methods). This means that your password will not be transmitted over your LAN or the Internet in plain text unnecessarily.

Attachment filtering

VPOP3 supports filtering of attachments based on filename (eg *.PIF, *.SCR etc) - either blocking the incoming message totally or removing the suspicious attachment. VPOP3 will detect the attachments in MIME, UUEncoded, BINHEX or MS-TNEF encoded messages

(VPOP3 2.0.0 only supported attachment filtering of MIME encoded messages)

Flexible Scheduling

VPOP3 allows you to create several schedules to automatically collect and send your emails to the Internet. So, for instance, you could have VPOP3 collecting your mail every 10 minutes during the week, but only every 2 hours at weekends. Or, you could have VPOP3 collecting mail from one ISP account every 10 minutes, and a different ISP account every hour.

(Previous versions of VPOP3 only allowed a single schedule or explicitly defining each connection time)

Virus Scanning can silently delete messages

VPOP3 can silently delete messages containing certain viruses whilst cleaning messages containing other viruses. For instance, if the virus is an email worm virus, then it can usually be silently deleted, but an Excel Macro virus might be contained in a legitimate message from an important customer, so you might want to receive the rest of the message (without the infected attachment) so you can respond to your customer informing them of the problem.

On Demand Mail Relay (ODMR) support

VPOP3 can collect mail from a mail server supporting the new ODMR standard. This standard allows authenticated incoming SMTP connections to computers using dynamic IP addresses.

Backup Connection methods

VPOP3 can automatically use a second connection to the Internet if the first one fails. For instance you may have both an ADSL and a dial-up Internet account. VPOP3 can be configured to automatically call the dial-up account if the ADSL connection isn't working.

Support multiple list servers

VPOP3 Enterprise allows you to have multiple different mailing list servers each handling different mailing lists. This is useful when the same VPOP3 server is used for handling the email for several different organisations.

ODBC Mailing Lists

VPOP3 Enterprise allows you to define mailing lists whose members are stored in an ODBC capable database - eg a customer contact database. In V2.0.0 and later you can also have the mailing lists themselves defined in the ODBC database.

Remote VPOP3 Status Monitor

The VPOP3 Status Monitor allows the administrators (or anyone else) to monitor the status of the VPOP3 server over your LAN. VPOP3 allows you to define permissions for each user, so you could say that your administrator can use the status monitor to view the mailbox message counts, and trigger connections, but other users can only use the status monitor to see when the next and last poll for new email occurred.

Web-browser based Administration

VPOP3 can be fully configured and maintained from any computer on the LAN (or Internet, if so desired) using a web browser.

Plugins supported

VPOP3 supports several different forms of plugins to enhance the power of VPOP3. These allow things such as filtering messages.

Shared Message Folders

VPOP3 Enterprise supports the 'Access Control List' extension to the IMAP4 protocol. This allows email message folders to be easily shared between users. Users can define what access other users will have to which folders, so, for instance, you could say that certain users can have read only access to some of your mail folders, and write access to another folder, and so on.

Realtime Black List (RBL) checking

VPOP3 Enterprise can access external RBL databases to check incoming SMTP mail against known spam sources.

Support the Sophos SAVI virus scanner

VPOP3 can use the SAV Interface component from Sophos to scan incoming and outgoing emails for viruses. VPOP3 can also download updated virus definition files for Sophos if you do not have a Sophos Enterprise Manager licence

User security settings

VPOP3 can áutomatically lock out users for a user-defined time after a specified number of failed login attempts. This makes it much harder to crack a user's email password using a brute force or dictionary attack.

VPOP3 can also enforce a 'minimum password length' rule to encourage more secure passwords.

Personal and Global Address Book

VPOP3 allows users to create and maintain their own personal entries in the VPOP3 address book, allowing access from within most email clients (using LDAP). Users can also share their address book entries, or make entries in the VPOP3 global address book.

(Previous versions of VPOP3 only supported the Global address book, not personal ones)

ODBC Address Book

VPOP3 Enterprise can use an ODBC database as an extra source of data for its LDAP address book database to allow retrieval of information from a customer contacts database, for instance.

IMAP4

VPOP3 Enterprise supports the IMAP4 email protocol to allow messages to be stored and manipulated on the mail server. This allows features such as easier email backup, hot desking, shared email accounts etc.

Use NT Passwords

VPOP3 can import user details from an NT/2000/2003 user database (either the whole database or a specified user group) and check their login passwords against the password defined in NT/2000/2003. This allows users to change their NT domain password and automatically have their new password used for their email as well.

SMTP Rules

VPOP3 can use a simple rule syntax for deciding how to handle messages it receives using SMTP (either incoming or outgoing). This can be used to block or delete certain messages as well as to redirect them.

SMTP Direct Sending

VPOP3 supports routing outgoing emails directly using MX records, bypassing an ISP. This means it can be used with an Internet connection which doesn't come with an associated SMTP relay service from the ISP.

Message Monitoring

VPOP3 allows a specified user/mailbox to receive copies of all (or random) incoming/outgoing/internal messages from all or selected users. This can be used for quality control purposes, or for email archiving etc.

Anti-relay protection

VPOP3 supports several methods for preventing the unauthorised use of the VPOP3 SMTP service for distributing email. This is necessary nowadays because many spammers will use an unprotected mail server without the permission of the mail server's operators. VPOP3 can prevent this happening.

Mailing List server

VPOP3 allows you to create, run and maintain mailing lists using its built-in mailing list server. This supports facilities such as user subscription and unsubscription, mailing list digests, banning users, etc

Support custom recipient header fields

Many ISPs will add header lines such as Delivered-To or X-RCPT-TO into messages as they are put into their POP3 mailboxes. VPOP3 can optionally check for and read these header lines to use for routing incoming POP3 messages.

Support for multiple sites

VPOP3 has features which allow for the easy use of VPOP3 across multiple sites all sharing the same email domain.

Common disclaimer/signature

VPOP3 can add common text to the bottom of all outgoing emails. This can be used, for instance, for a legal disclaimer on all emails.

In VPOP3 2.1.2 and later, signatures can be in HTML or plain text (in earlier versions they were just plain text) and can be customised using LDAP data etc.

Finger Server

VPOP3 supports the finger service allowing people to access published information about users.

LAN Forwarding

VPOP3 can forward specified emails to another mail server on your LAN or WAN (eg another VPOP3 server across a WAN, or a Microsoft Exchange Server on your LAN)

Autoresponders

VPOP3 can automatically send a response to message senders when a message arrives in a mailbox. This response message is fully customisable, and the built-in processor contains facilities for automatica text replacement etc.

You can also tell VPOP3 to run a program (or PERL script etc) whenever a message appears in a specified user's mailbox (you can define a programmed autoresponder for each user if desired)

Support multiple ISPs

VPOP3 can collect mail from multiple ISPs using a mixture of collection methods (POP3 and SMTP). It can also be configured to send mail through several different ISPs, as well as to connect to the Internet using different ISPs.

Download Rules

VPOP3 can use a simple rule syntax to decide whether or not to download certain messages from an ISP POP3 account. It can also use these rules for message redirection, silent deletion etc.