Overview
Simple administration
iCal Server 2
Address Book Server
Podcast Producer 2
Wiki Server 2
Mobile Access Server
iChat Server
File sharing
Mail services
Web hosting
Spotlight Server
Client management
Networking and VPN
Mail Services. Postmaster to the world.
Mail services in Snow Leopard Server feature a new engine that outperforms previous versions and scales to handle tens of thousands of users. It’s based entirely on open standards, providing compatibility with your existing network infrastructure — as well as with email clients on the Mac, PC and even iPhone. And because there are no per-user licensing fees, you can add mail accounts without draining your software licensing budget.
Inbox, outbox.
The ideal solution for small businesses or companies without an existing mail server, Mac OS X Server allows you to bring email in-house, using your own domain name rather than relying on an ISP to host your email. And Mail Server in Snow Leopard Server includes a new engine that not only outperforms the previous version but also outperforms high-end, enterprise-class mail servers.*
If your organisation already has a mail server, you’ll appreciate how seamlessly Mac OS X Server integrates into your network, ensuring that all outbound email is forwarded — or relayed — through your company’s mail servers.
Junk mail filtering.
Mac OS X Server includes a powerful junk mail filter that analyses the text of each email and assigns it a probability rating for being junk mail — and then marks the mail as potential junk. The filter is adaptive, always learning to distinguish between what is good and what is junk.
Virus detection and quarantine.
Email is the primary mechanism viruses use to spread and propagate from one computer to another. That’s why Mac OS X Server includes an antivirus engine to scan mail messages and attachments for viruses, automatically deleting or quarantining any offending files.
Vacation messages and
server-side rules.
Snow Leopard Server now includes support for vacation messages, which automatically notify people when a user is out of the office. It also supports server-side mail rules, an ideal feature for people who receive lots of email or who access their email from multiple locations. Mac OS X Server can filter email messages based on criteria the user defines and automatically place the message in the appropriate mailbox.
Mailing lists.
Mac OS X Server makes it easy for people to communicate using group mailing lists. Any group on the server can be assigned its own mailing list by an administrator using Server Preferences. Or users can create their own group mailing lists using a simple web interface in their browser.
Mail Server Performance*
Snow Leopard Server
1.7x
Sun Java Messaging Server
SPECmail_Ent2009 results
Secure email.
With SSL/TLS encryption for SMTP, POP and IMAP, Mac OS X Server can encrypt the data sent between the server and the mail client. This allows secure and confidential transport of mail messages and attachments within a network and it’s ideal for providing secure over-the-air email access for iPhone users.
Push email.
With Mac OS X Server, you can keep users up to date wherever they go with push email. Users can receive immediate notification of and access to new email messages when they arrive. It’s no longer necessary to constantly check for new mail messages.
Mail server clustering.
You can cluster multiple mail servers using Xsan as the back-end data store, ensuring reliable data access for all servers in the cluster and making it easy to scale your mail server infrastructure to handle increasing loads. Mail server clustering allows a large number of mail service connections to be spread across multiple servers and provides automatic failover from one server to another. Using Xsan with Mac OS X Server, each IMAP, POP and SMTP server has direct block-level access to the same data. If a server goes offline, another node in the cluster takes over processing of the failed server’s spool file and affected mail clients automatically reestablish connections to another server in the cluster.
*Testing conducted by Apple in May 2009. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of Xserve and Mac OS X Server. View more detailed information.
