A mail server for your company, with webmail for every mailbox.
ChainMail
A mail server your Outlook already knows how to talk to.
ChainMail is a multi-tenant mail platform that speaks the protocols Outlook expects — MAPI over HTTP, Autodiscover, EWS — alongside plain IMAP and POP3, and every mailbox comes with its own webmail. Mailboxes replicate between machines continuously and fail over to a standby without anyone re-entering a password.
- Protocols
- MAPI over HTTP, Autodiscover, EWS, IMAP4, POP3, ActiveSync, SMTP
- Clients
- Classic Outlook with no plugin, the included webmail, any IMAP or POP client
- Webmail
- Rivet Mail, included and switched on for every mailbox — mail, calendar, contacts and scheduling
- Replication
- Continuous block-level snapshots, one dataset per tenant
- Failover
- Automatic failover with hardware fencing, proven in three live drills
- Deployment
- Single server, replicated pair, or hosted by us
- Tenancy
- Multi-tenant, per-tenant branding, reseller hierarchy
Outlook connects without a plugin
ChainMail answers Autodiscover and serves MAPI over HTTP, which is what Outlook looks for. Users type an address and a password; nothing is installed, and no compatibility layer sits in between.
Every mailbox is replicated as you use it
Each tenant gets its own filesystem dataset, snapshotted and streamed to a second machine continuously. A failure loses the seconds since the last snapshot, not the day.
Failover that has actually been tested
The standby takes over automatically, and the failed node is fenced at the hypervisor so it cannot come back and write to the same storage. We have run it three times against real machines rather than assuming it works.
Webmail comes with every mailbox
Every ChainMail mailbox can sign in to Rivet Mail, the webmail, from any current browser with no plugin — there is nothing to switch on and nothing extra to buy. Mail, calendar, contacts, the global address list, shared mailboxes and out-of-office are all there, with your own logo and colours. It was written clean-room, with no code taken from any AGPL or GPL webmail, which is what makes it legal to ship inside an installation you own.
A calendar and a scheduling assistant that work
Repeating meetings expand correctly, and a single changed occurrence stays changed without breaking the series. The scheduling assistant reads attendees' real free/busy data from the server, so you pick a slot that works instead of sending an invitation and waiting.
Shared mailboxes and delegation
Shared inboxes, calendar sharing, send-as and delegate access work the way people expect coming from Exchange, because the protocol underneath is the same one.
An admin panel, not a config file
Domains, mailboxes, aliases, forwarding, quotas and distribution lists are managed from a web panel. Resellers get their own scoped view of only their own customers.
Run it on your own hardware
The same build runs on a single server in your office, on a replicated pair, or on our infrastructure. Moving between them is a migration, not a rewrite.