Captain Mail

Solutions and services to help your business with email

Hello, and welcome to Captain Mail's web page!

You are quite likely an email user, and/or even worse, responsible for email in your organization. We may be able to help you!

Our offerings are in three broad areas:

Clean (Filtered) email relay service
Mass mailing solution with Email Merge Software
Custom setup of Linux based email servers

Clean email relay services
For various reasons, you may prefer to have an email server in your office - could be MS Exchange or Small Business Server, Lotus Notes, Scalix, mdaemon, or any other. Instead of integrating spam + virus filtering tools and keeping your server running 24x7, you can use our Clean Email Relay service.

All that you have to do is to point the MX records in your domain's DNS to our MX hosts and we will do the rest. Generally, we are able to eliminate over 98% or spam and in the past 2 years not even a single virus infected attachment has got through.

This service won't make a hole in your pocket - pricing starts at $15 per GB of email data transfer (independent of the number of users !) There is no restriction on the number of incoming emails either. You can use it for outgoing email too.

Secondary / alternate MX service: Our MX hosts can act as the secondary MX host for your domain, so that if your MX host or Internet link is down, the incoming email won't bounce back and will come to our server; we will hold it for several days and try to relay it to your server. This will save you the embarassment of having emails bounce back to the original senders.

Mass mailing solution (Email marketing) with Email Merge
If you need to send custom emails to a list of recipients, this is the right solution for you. It is very easy to use, with no complexities of databases, tracking, clicks, etc.

All that you need to do is:

Create a list of email ids, with “merge” substitutions for each email id, e.g. Title, Name, Address, etc. This whole file can be created in a spreadsheet like Excel or OpenOffice Calc and saved in CSV format.
The actual message file, in text or HTML format. This can be created using common software like Word, Wordpad, KompoZer, or any HTML editor/authoring tool.

These files are uploaded using the web interface. There is a provision for attaching files to the email message. The “From” line and “Subject” line also need to be specified. The message is then “merged” and sent out to all the recipients listed in the merge file, one message per recipient.

It is a web based hosted service (SaaS) and you only need to pay based on the number of emails you will be sending out. Pricing starts at $5 per month for 300 email ids, and you can even take it for just 1 month!

Note that this service is available for bona fide businesses and not spammers. In case any spamming activity is suspected, the service will be terminated immediately.

Custom setup and management of Linux Email servers

A nice web based front end (web GUI) for Postfix, i.e. a Linux based mail server which uses Postfix + LDAP + Cyrus + Amavis + Spamassassin + ClamAV. The great advantage is that the mail server can be administered without going to the command line, so no Linux administration skills are required
Solutions for email archival, email filtering (virus and spam) and email clusters based on Linux and other free/open source modules
Setup of custom configurations of email service on Linux
Developing custom (shell) scripts for email log processing
24x7 automated monitoring of email service (note that this is far more sophisticated than the usual ping/port status)
On-going management of your email service: including monitoring, support, troubleshooting, patch management and daily administration, checking logs regularly, providing regular reports
Email server management / managed services: We will manage your email server for you, fully - routine administration, troubleshooting, log checks, software updates, disaster recovery, etc.

Since we have been doing this for quite a while now, we have expertise in many areas/modules, including:

Linux and Solaris platforms
postfix, qmail and sendmail
spamassassin
clamAV
LDAP
saslauth
Scripting

mailscanner
amavisd
webmin
Cacti
MRTG and ntop
Python programming
DocMgr (document management)
LTSP

Cyrus IMAP, Dovecot IMAP
drbd and heartbeat
AWSTATS
Squirrelmail, Roundcube
Egroupware
Horde IMP
Funambol
Request Tracker (RT)

If you have any consulting / services / support / implementation requirements in these or related areas, or any queries, we would be happy to hear from you. Please write to us at sales@captain-mail.com

Thanks for visiting!

All trademarks acknowledged.

Last updated: September 2009