What Is SmarterMail?

SmarterMail is a full-featured email, calendaring, collaboration, groupware, and group chat server that administrators can run on their own infrastructure on Windows, on Linux, or in Docker. As a direct alternative to Microsoft Exchange, it handles the core messaging protocols an administrator expects (SMTP, IMAP, POP3) while also layering on webmail, collaboration, chat, security, and reporting into a single installation. Because it is self-hosted, the administrator retains full control over data location, retention, and compliance, rather than depending on a third-party cloud mailbox provider.

SmarterMail is available in a few different Editions, and it helps to know which one you are actually managing before diving into settings:

SmarterMail Professional — A single, standalone installation aimed at small businesses, teams, and individual users who need reliable core email and collaboration (calendars, contacts, tasks, notes) without the advanced enterprise add-ons.
SmarterMail Enterprise — A single, standalone installation that includes everything in Professional plus features aimed at larger organizations and hosting providers: Online Meetings, Live Chat, basic failover, LDAP and Active Directory authentication, and compliance-grade email/chat archiving. Enterprise is also the edition required to license the optional EAS (Exchange ActiveSync) and MAPI/EWS add-ons.
SmarterMail Free — Functionally similar to Enterprise, but capped at one domain and up to 10 users. It is commonly used to evaluate features before purchase, or deployed at no cost as a dedicated inbound/outbound gateway or backup MX server.
SmarterMail High Availability (HA) — A separate, clustered deployment model (multiple hub and node servers behind a load balancer) built for fault tolerance and horizontal scaling, rather than a single-server installation. See the What Is SmarterMail High Availability topic for details, or the edition comparison page for a full feature-by-feature breakdown.

Regardless of which edition is running, the sections below cover the feature areas an administrator will actually configure and support day to day.

Messaging and Webmail

At its core, SmarterMail is an SMTP/IMAP/POP3 mail server with a modern, browser-based webmail client built on top of it. The webmail interface is responsive, meaning the same interface adapts to desktop browsers, tablets, and phones without requiring a separate mobile app. Because everything is accessible through a browser, end users can work from any device without an administrator needing to configure and support a separate desktop client for every user.

Example: A remote employee can triage their inbox from a phone browser in the morning and pick up the exact same session, read/unread state, and folder structure from a desktop browser at the office, with nothing to install on either device.

Collaboration Features

Beyond email, SmarterMail includes full personal and domain-level collaboration tools: calendars, contacts, tasks, and notes. These aren't bolted-on extras — they support sharing, delegation, and synchronization the same way a user's mailbox does.

Calendars — Users can share individual calendars with specific permission levels (view-only, edit, etc.), and administrators can configure domain-wide shared calendars that every user on that domain can see, such as a company holiday or events calendar.
Contacts — In addition to personal contact lists, SmarterMail supports a domain-level Global Address List (GAL), so every user on a domain can look up colleagues without maintaining their own contact entries. Contact groups (distribution-list-style groupings of contacts) are also supported.
Tasks and Notes — Personal and shared to-do lists and notes, which can be linked directly to email messages (for example, converting a message into a follow-up task).
Delegation — A user can grant another user (such as an assistant) rights to manage their calendar or inbox on their behalf, similar to delegate access in Exchange/Outlook.

Example: A domain administrator sets up a shared "Support Team" calendar so that all support staff can see each other's on-call shifts and PTO, while each individual keeps their personal calendar private.

Chat and Online Meetings

SmarterMail includes an integrated group chat system usable directly from the webmail interface, as well as through third-party XMPP-compatible chat clients. On top of chat, SmarterMail also offers integrated online meetings that combine group chat, inline file sharing, and audio/video conferencing — useful for organizations that want a single vendor for email and internal communication rather than paying for a separate meeting platform.

Example: A team can hold a quick video call and share a file mid-conversation without leaving the SmarterMail interface or provisioning a separate conferencing tool.

Third-Party Client Synchronization

Administrators frequently need to support users who insist on a native desktop or mobile client rather than webmail. SmarterMail supports the standard synchronization protocols out of the box:

IMAP / POP3 for mail retrieval.
CalDAV / CardDAV for calendar and contact synchronization with clients like Apple Mail, Windows Mail, and eM Client on desktop, and native calendar/contact apps on Android and iOS.

For organizations that specifically need Outlook parity, SmarterMail (Enterprise edition) offers two licensed add-ons:

MAPI & EWS — Provides server-side support for full Microsoft Outlook 2016+ integration on Windows, as well as Outlook for Mac, Apple Mail, and eM Client via Exchange Web Services. This is what allows Outlook to work against SmarterMail the same way it works against Exchange, including features like shared mailbox access and free/busy lookups.
EAS (Exchange ActiveSync) — Enables push synchronization of mail, contacts, calendars, and tasks to mobile clients that speak the ActiveSync protocol, such as the native mail apps on iOS and the Outlook mobile app.

Example: A company migrating off Exchange can keep every employee on Outlook by licensing the MAPI & EWS add-on, so the transition is invisible to end users at the desktop level.

Security: Antispam and Antivirus

SmarterMail includes structured, multi-layered antispam and antivirus scanning at no additional licensing cost. Messages are evaluated against multiple checks (such as SPF, DKIM, DMARC, RBLs/URIBLs, greylisting, and signature-based spam scoring) before a final spam score determines whether a message is delivered, quarantined, or rejected.

A related feature, the sender verification shield, displays an at-a-glance indicator in webmail showing whether a message's sender passed authentication checks like SPF and DKIM — helping end users spot spoofed or suspicious senders without needing to understand the underlying protocols themselves.

For organizations that want additional detection engines beyond what's built in, optional paid add-ons are available, including Cyren Premium Antispam and Message Sniffer, as well as support for third-party antivirus products.

Example: An email claiming to be from a bank, but that fails DKIM and SPF checks, shows a warning shield icon in the message list, prompting the end user to scrutinize it before clicking any links.

Network Security: Intrusion Detection and Gateways

SmarterMail includes built-in intrusion detection (IDS) that watches for abusive connection patterns, such as repeated failed logins or connection floods, and can automatically block offending IP addresses to mitigate brute-force and DDoS attempts — without requiring a separate firewall appliance.

SmarterMail can also be deployed purely as a gateway rather than (or in addition to) a primary mail server:

Inbound gateway — Sits in front of a primary mail server, absorbing SMTP connections, running spam/virus checks, and only passing clean mail through. This reduces load on the primary server and can even be run using the free edition.
Outbound gateway — Spools outbound mail so that if a sending IP gets blacklisted, an administrator can rotate to a different gateway IP without touching the primary mail server's configuration.
Backup MX — Accepts and holds mail temporarily if the primary mail server is unreachable, then delivers it once the primary server comes back online.

Example: A hosting provider runs a free-edition SmarterMail instance purely as an inbound gateway in front of its primary Enterprise server, so that any spam floods or connection abuse are absorbed before they ever reach the production mailbox server.

Failover

SmarterMail Enterprise supports basic failover functionality, allowing a secondary server to take over if the primary server becomes unavailable. This is distinct from SmarterMail High Availability, which provides true clustering across multiple hub and node servers; failover in Enterprise is intended as a simpler, single-standby-server safety net rather than a horizontally scaled cluster.

Archiving and Compliance

For organizations with regulatory obligations, SmarterMail (Enterprise) supports email and chat archiving, retaining copies of messages independent of what a user does in their own mailbox (deleting a message doesn't remove it from the archive). This is commonly required for standards such as SOX or HIPAA. Administrators, or designated compliance officers, can search the archive independently of end-user mailboxes.

Example: A healthcare organization enables archiving so that even if a staff member deletes a message containing patient information from their inbox, a compliance officer can still retrieve it during an audit.

Reporting

SmarterMail provides detailed reporting dashboards at three levels of scope:

Mailbox/User level — Disk usage, inbound/outbound message volume, spam caught, and viruses caught for an individual mailbox.
Domain level — The same categories aggregated across an entire domain, plus protocol session counts (SMTP, IMAP, POP) and bandwidth usage, useful for a domain administrator managing multiple users.
System level — Server-wide statistics including hardware utilization, IDS blocks, authentication failures, and antispam engine performance (SpamAssassin, Rspamd, Cyren, Message Sniffer), useful for a system administrator monitoring overall server health.

Example: A system administrator notices a spike in the system-level "IDS Blocks" report and drills down to identify a single IP address responsible for a brute-force login attempt.

Marketplace and Extensibility

Rather than building every possible integration directly into the product, SmarterMail exposes a Marketplace that lets administrators connect well-known third-party tools where it makes sense. This keeps the core product lean while still letting an organization build out a full communications platform around SmarterMail. Marketplace categories include:

AI Integration — AI-assisted email drafting, invite creation, and newsletter/announcement composition (for example, via an OpenAI integration), aimed at reducing the time users spend writing routine messages.
Document Collaboration — Integrations such as OnlyOffice and Collabora for real-time, in-browser document editing on files stored in SmarterMail.
File Storage — In addition to SmarterMail's own integrated file storage, users can connect external providers like OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, ownCloud, and Leitzcloud.
Live Chat and Online Meetings — Third-party options like RocketChat alongside SmarterMail's own built-in chat and meeting tools.
Email Clients — Guided setup for third-party clients such as eM Client.

Example: Rather than building a proprietary document editor, SmarterMail lets an administrator connect OnlyOffice so users can co-edit a spreadsheet attachment directly in their browser.

Why Administrators Choose SmarterMail

Compared to running Microsoft Exchange, administrators typically evaluate SmarterMail because it runs on lower hardware requirements, carries lower licensing and maintenance costs, and consolidates messaging, collaboration, chat, security, and reporting into one manageable product — while still supporting the client compatibility (Outlook, mobile ActiveSync, IMAP/CalDAV clients) that end users expect from an Exchange-class server.