I'm wondering whether SmarterMail will retain the following limitations of the current HMS mail interface:

1) Email aliases must resolve to less than 512 characters. (Therefore, to have a large mailing list, I must set up several sublists.)

2) Domain content filters don't apply to aliases, just user mailboxes. (Therefore, to filter an alias, I have to set up a user whose mail is forwarded to a dummy alias.)

3) Aliases are expanded one at a time, so that if a message is sent to alias1 which expands to alias2 and alias3, and alias2 and alias3 each include the same user, then that user will receive 2 copies of the message. (Ideally, if the aliases were all in the same domain, the software would expand all the aliases at once and then eliminate duplicate copies to a single user.)

I've emailed support and will post here when they answer me, but perhaps some of you know the answers already.

All good questions that I don't have an answer for - yet. I'll be checking on this and replying to this post later today with answers. Thanks!

I received the following answer from HMS today:

Here is the response that SmarterTools provided for those requests:

1) I cut and paste our entire SmarterMail updates mail list subscribers into an alias and added it - there is definitely no 512 character limit to aliases.

3) aliases that include other aliases will not send multiple times to users that are in those aliases. SmarterMail will track what addresses have been sent to in order to avoid looping. So if aliasA contains aliasB, aliasC and aliasD and my address is listed in all 4 aliases, I will still only get one copy of the message when someone sends to aliasA.

They are also looking into applying content filters to aliases; this would likely be a change implemented in v3.0, due out this summer.

Sorry - I meant to post that here as well. Thanks for doing that for me!