Samiksha Jaiswal (Editor)

HMailServer

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Developer(s)
  
Martin Knafve

Written in
  
C++, C#

HMailServer

Initial release
  
2002; 15 years ago (2002)

Stable release
  
5.6.4 (Build 2283) / 9 July 2015; 19 months ago (2015-07-09)

Repository
  
github.com/hmailserver/hmailserver

Operating system
  
Microsoft Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008 (v4.0/v5.0)

hMailServer is a free email server for Windows created by Martin Knafve. It runs as a Windows service and includes administration tools for management and backup. It has support for IMAP, POP3, and SMTP email protocols. It can use external database engines such as MySQL, MS SQL or PostgreSQL, or an internal MS SQL engine to store configuration and index data. The actual email messages are stored on disk in a raw MIME format. It has active support and development forums.

Contents

Common features such as multiple-domain support, aliases, catch-all and basic mailing lists are present. Users can be authenticated both against the local hMailServer user system and against an external Active Directory.

AntiSpam

hMailServer offers a number of different AntiSpam mechanisms:

  • Host based DNS Blacklisting (DNSBL)
  • URL based DNS blacklisting (SURBL)
  • Greylisting (must retry sending for the message to succeed)
  • SPF
  • Built in SpamAssassin integration
  • DKIM (in version 5.1)

    • AntiVirus

    hMailServer has built in support for ClamWin/ClamAV. It's possible to execute any command line virus scanner.

    Other features

  • Domain and account signatures (for legal and advertising footers)
  • Server side rules (rules for individual accounts available in v5)
  • Retrieval of messages from external POP3 accounts
  • Quotas on domain, mailbox, and individual message sizes
  • Plus addressing (using + to make a virtual alias for an account specific to a task, as seen in Gmail)
  • Attachment blocking (based on attachment extension)
  • Custom SMTP routes for specific domains (can be used to set up MX backup, forwarding and more)
  • API (it's possible to write hMailServer scripts using VBScript and JScript)
  • Built-in support for SSL

    • Integration

  • ClamAV anti-virus software
  • SquirrelMail for webmail, (requires IIS or Apache); spell-checking available
  • Roundcube for webmail, also requires auxiliary database provider such as mySQL to operate
  • SpamAssassin spam filtering

    • History

    The hMailServer project was started in 2003. Up until 2008 and version 4, the project was licensed under the GPL. Versions 5.0 to 5.3 were proprietary. Since version 5.4, hMailServer is licensed under the GNU AGPL 3,.
    The current version of hMailServer appears to be open source again This is also noted on the hMailServer home page.

    References

    HMailServer Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA