Service Provider Networks / (none) /

Novell boosts Internet mail package for ISPs

By Deni Connor
The Edge, 11/20/00

SAN JOSE - Novell has bolstered its standards-based Internet messaging system for ISPs and application service providers by adding features that increase the security and performance of the system and make wireless Web access possible.

The Novell Internet Messaging System (NIMS) 2.6, introduced at ISPcon in San Jose last week, now supports Wireless Markup Language (WML) and global system for mobile communications (GSM) standards and lets users with virtually any wireless phone access their e-mail from remote locations. WML, formerly the Handheld Devices Markup Language, lets content be displayed on narrowband devices such as wireless phones. GSM allows for interoperability across international boundaries.

"We have a large user base with handheld devices, Palm Pilots, pagers and phones," says Chris Kirkwood, principle for KIS Communications, an Internet and application hosting company in Irvine, Calif. Kirkwood has about 3,000 users that access NIMS on a NetWare server. He plans to install NIMS on Linux and Solaris servers.

"With NIMS you can create, reply and archive mail - anything you can do with a normal mail client," he says.

Web-Feet Research expects that wireless phone services will boom from $172 billion in 1999 to more than $480 billion by 2005.

NIMS also now use OpenSSL, which allows connections to take place with little performance penalty. According to company claims, OpenSSL is capable of 80 handshakes per second, or double the previous version of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). OpenSSL is SSL combined with the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol that provides communication privacy over the Internet. TLS provides security at the Open Systems Interconnection Transport Layer.

"OpenSSL encrypts the communication when you are online, so it is private," Kirkwood says. "OpenSSL is compliant with everything out there."

In addition, NIMs also supports a list server. "The list server works just like a majordomo would," Kirkwood says. "If you want to broadcast a message to all your customers, you can. For instance, you could build a mailing list of every subscriber and send them a message, such as a price list or notification of a company meeting."

Administrators can also make configuration changes, add new users or groups of users to the messaging system without taking down the message server, saving time and money. The system also executes a self-cleaning task, and performance has increased by 20 to 30% over the last version, company officials say.

NIMS is $20 per user and is available now.