One thing that I haven't seen fully implemented in e-mail software (hosted at least), is the ability for an administrator to fully control what access methods (web, POP, IMAP) users have to particular accounts.

In my case, I've got a few accounts that I'd like people to access via the provided web interface, or IMAP, but not POP. One group I work for is pretty small, and we have about 5 people (all working from home) that monitor and respond to our 'support' account. If everyone is using IMAP or the web, then we can all see all incoming and outgoing messages (which is what I want). I'm just waiting for the day when one of the people sets up Outlook Express incorrectly (using the POP default instead of IMAP), and ends up deleting all of the messages off of the server so the rest of us can't see them. I do locally archive all messages periodically, but I'd prefer to prevent this right at the server.

Can someone at HMS maybe request this from the SmarterMail people?

OK, just to be clear, you want to be able to pick which method of email access your clients use, right from the SmarterMail Interface on a Domain Level?

I can suggest that to them if that is what you are looking for (they take our suggestions pretty seriously), so somethig like this could be implemented.

Please let me know!

You're pretty close. I would like to be able to set this right in the SmarterMail interface. But, I think I would need to be able to set this for each account, rather than just the domain. (Having it for the domain could be useful, but the real value is when it's account specific).

For example, I'd like to set support@MyDomain.com to only allow web or IMAP access, since several support staff need to share this account.

For the JoeSmith@MyDomain.com account, I'd allow POP (but no web or IMAP). The JoeSmith@MyDomain.com account is a personal e-mail account for Joe Smith. He doesn't need to share e-mail access to the account with anyone, so IMAP is not needed (especially if I want to conserve server space). And, maybe I'm also worried about him checking his e-mail on just any terminal so I'll disable web access (though I'll admit this is far from foolproof).

In my particular case, probably the most important thing is to be able to disable POP access to accounts. But, if you can do that, why not provide all the access options for the administrator?

Thanks!

Imail Server actually had this feature, so it's one of the things that we used to support but no longer do so. I'll put in the suggestion to SmarterTools however and they may be able to add it to their next release, which is due out in 4th quarter of this year.