ArgoSoft Pro

When I began my career in the computer business 25 years ago, email was a minor application of virtually no importance. Remember that back then the internet did not exist in any recognizable form, the web was still twenty years away, and even screen editors didn't exist. We used line editors (you could replace an entire line of a text file at a time) and our computers communicated with each other via 1200 baud modem (if they talked at all, and believe me, we thought 1200 baud was fast).

Over the years I switched email systems more times than I could count. Eventually, I moved to CompuServer, then AOL and Hotmail, followed by Excite, and finally I dropped all of those silly free mail systems and used the email account provided by my ISP (Earthlink). This worked great for a while, until I decided to switch to Everyone.Net (which has a great service).

I've kept that account, but it did not provide all of the functions that I needed. Everyone is a great email service, but it didn't give me good spam control, it didn't have any antivirus protection, there were no autoresponders and no mailing lists. In other words, Everyone provided basic email without the bells and whistles.

But I wanted it all, so I started looking for a solution which gave me everything. This was partially driven by a need for lots of features to support my own web site (as described above), but also to give me some better control. That was the problem that I really wanted to solve - I wanted to control my email.

You see, email had moved from being a not-very-useful luxury to an essential tool, as valuable as the telephone and a heck of a lot cheaper. A few years ago, not getting email was a minor annoyance. These days it's a crisis.

This required a robust solution that always worked. I thought about it for a long time, and after much searching, found a program called ArgoSoft Pro. This neat application is a full-function email server, complete with anti-spam support (functional but limited), filtering (with additional filters available, some free and some at cost), mailing lists, autoresponders (single text message type) and hundreds of other features.

One major thing that attracted me to ArgoSoft was the fact that for less than a hundred bucks, I could define as many email accounts on as many domain names as I wanted. Yes, Argosoft Pro has no limits (to my knowledge) on these things. This made it perfect for my needs - my wife and I own over 180 domain names, and we could now define the email any way that we wanted.

Okay, so what is needed for this program? I bought a used, 200megahertz laptop and loaded the program. Speed was not critical, as the email was just for my wide and myself.  A few gigabytes of disk space for email storage was more than adequate, as that's far, far more than we had ever had before.

So that's the basic system (along with 384 megabytes of memory and a network connection). We also set up our own DNS server, as with so many domains it would be awkward to manage them through an ISP. This gave us the ability to define and redefine the MX records for each domain as needed. 

What else? Well, we had to have a fixed TCP/IP address, as the email must be routed to our server. We had to own at least domain name, and we had to have control of the DNS (at least the MX record).

ArgoSoft supports POP access, which is the same as most ISPs. You receive mail from your POP mailbox, and send to the ArgoSoft SMTP engine. This engine is actually very good. It multi-threads, which means it can do more than one thing at a time. I've actually seen the email server sending and receiving several messages at a time.

Of course the PRO version (which costs money) has no advertisements of any kind. This is a huge improvement over the free email services which depend upon online banners and text inserted into each email.

What's the downside? Well, this is not an email system fit for significant commercial use. The application is a little slow, and somewhat awkward. It does have a web interface, but this is no where near what's needed for real web-based email support (such as provided by Outlook Web Access or Hotmail or any of the other big providers).

The autoresponder package is useful (I've defined over 300 of them), but certainly not a replacement for a professional system such as GetResponse.Com. These are single-file, text-based autoresponders. Nothing fancy.

It's nice that ArgoSoft has mailing lists, and these lists are even double-opt-in. One small flaw: the lists are also double-opt-out, and I've found that single-opt-out works better. If someone asks to be removed from a list, they should be immediately removed and not have to confirm that removal.

The spam control is more-or-less useless for all but the most basic functions. You can add extensions to do more spam checking for you, but these tend to cost a few dollars.

Overall, this is a great email server. I really like it, and would most certainly recommend it without hesitation for an individual, a family or even a small company.