Running your own mail server is risky, despite the choices

I am a regular reader of the South China Morning Post and have been a follower of the Technology section for the past eight years. Reading your column 'E-mail management for small businesses' (February 7), I was a bit disappointed to see one of Europe's best e-mail management systems was not even mentioned. Merak Mail Server is used by more than 400 corporations and government departments in Hong Kong, according to my IT consultant, including my company.

We used to use Microsoft's Exchange but we had lots of problems with it. Also we had to pay a licence fee for each user, which I did not want to do as we have more than 500 users in our organisation. When Exchange went down, we had to do without receiving or sending e-mail for hours, sometimes even days.

In the two-and-a-half years we have used Merak, a European product, we have had almost no problems. When there were breakdowns, the problem usually turned out to be a hardware failure. I have been shown - and the company has guaranteed - that the system can be brought up in less than 10 minutes.

I have been very satisfied with Merak, and hope that more people get a chance at least to hear about it. I think your readers should know about more than just IBM and Microsoft products. I am, in fact, interested in buying shares of this company if it is publicly listed. Is it possible for you to let me know if it trades publicly?

Name and address supplied

The column you refer to had more to do with the legal implications of e-mail. I touched upon the two biggest mail servers in the market: Microsoft's Exchange Server and Lotus Notes from IBM.