Are there any small operators still using Smartermail?

Question asked by Rick Ryan - 9/20/2026 at 5:32 PM

Unanswered

I've been running SmarterMail since 2010. I provide email services to about 5 family owned businesses, and to family members requiring unique email, such as a son looking for a job and providing his portfolio at a website, a nephew running for political office, etc. I am not a believer in providing cloud email services with the ability to scan messages that rightly belong within the family.

Overall, I have about 11 active domains, an enterprise license, but am becoming overwhelmed by the spam, the rules, etc. I've also retired and none of my children or nieces/nephews are computer savvy outside their chosen GUI.

How many similar users are still trying to provide their own email servers? If you have given up, where did you move your domains? Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Apple, etc. are all non-starters for me.

Would also be interested in the annual change in cost if you did move.

Thanks in advance

4 Replies

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J. LaDow Replied

9/20/2026 at 7:28 PM

We run SmarterMail for service for clients housed on our web services --

SmarterMail's new SpamFoo is showing quite a bit of promise based on our testing over the last couple days in regards to the spam wars.

We are not recommending ANY major cloud providers due to privacy issues and the continued monetization of everyone's data whether they like it or not, and the continual dark patterns when it comes to trying to opt-out of those privacy invasions they market as "tools"...

That said, if you need a host for those domains, we have options available. DMs are open --

MailEnable survivor / convert --

Brian Replied

Yesterday at 2:27 AM

We run email for our clients that want to evade Microsoft and due to european privacy matters.

We dont have anything on Microsoft or any other cloud provider at all. We run our own datacenters here in Denmark.

William Allen Replied

Yesterday at 9:27 AM

We as well are a small outfit providing personalized secure communication to about a dozen domains for our clients. We pride ourselves in preventing datamining of our clients data, all on our own encrypted servers. We have been doing it for 20 years now. For 20 years we used Merak/IceWarp servers but just got fed up with all the maintenance it required. Smartermail has been easy and the updates have installed flawlessly.

The Spam Foo and message sniffer have cratered the amount of spam our clients were getting.

Merle Wait Replied

Yesterday at 2:39 PM

We are a small outfit as well.
We provide services for about 20 years as well, but early 2000s we too left IceWarp = and came over to SmartTools. Plan to be here for quite some time.

Email is not our primary service...we are software developers // service platform hosting.

In our spare time.. we are building our own spam filtering usage - based upon what we have observed for our clients. Basically.. we are have a a database by user of approved senders of emails to our users, as well as non-spam. ANything else that comes in will be listed as spam, until the user moves it otherwise.

Anyway.... part of the reason that we are now growing in email services.. is ... who wants their PDF in google to help grow their AI data??? True, they will never "specifically identify" that data as being yours.. but it who wants your business SOP to end up in an aggregated response of AI?

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