Webmail
Above, you can see a screenshot of Axigen's webmail interface. Apart from it being a web interface, I actually like it. On the left, you have your typical inbox setup, with folders among other things. Because my account on my domain is marked as "premium" instead of "basic", I also have the other webmail features too, such as the calendar and notes area. Those are more then likely useful, but I personally don't use them because I use my Outlook.com calendar and Microsoft OneNote for note taking.
Another thing I liked about the web interface was the "tabs at the top". You can view multiple emails and reply to them, each in different tabs. That's something Outlook.com can't do, as of this post. With the tabs, I can be in the middle of composing a message while checking my inbox at the same time. I find that very cool.
You guys might notice that in the screenshots, my email is techman@techmansworld.com, but in the compose screenshot, my "From" email is michael@techmansworld.com. Your eyes are not lying to you; those are indeed different addresses. I actually have my email address, such as michael and info aliased to techman. I can always choose my "From" address by clicking From.
Other clients
With Axigen's webadmin, you can open additional ports for POP3, SMTP, IMAP (and more) services. By default, only plaintext ports are set up when you install Axigen. However, even though plaintext ports are opened by default you can use STARTTLS. You can open more ports and enable SSL on them if you want dedicated SSL ports.
You can easily use other clients (like Thunderbird) with Axigen. Higher tiered licenses (not the free one) can also use Exchange ActivSync for clients that support it. I find IMAP dull because it doesn't sync everything like Microsoft's own protocol. Maybe someday we'll have a more open standard that is like it? Until then, I'm fine using webmail interfaces.
Advertising
There is one thing, however, that really does irritate me about Axigen, and that's the spam it sends out when you send an email. You won't see it by viewing the mail headers for sent mail, but you'll see it when someone replies to an email you send. Under my message signature, Axigen will tack on something along the lines of "Sent using Axigen Free Mail Server (link)". It personally don't bother me enough for me to not want to use Axigen anymore, but I really hope in a future release they get rid of this. If I wanted to know what mail server someone was using, I'd look at their mail headers.
Wrap up
In future posts, I'll probably address the Axigen Webadmin interface, among other things. Hope you guys enjoyed this quick "peek" at Axigen. So far, so good (except for that spam...ugh).
