Spee dy File Delivery on the Web

Until e-mail-attachment standards become standard, Tumbleweed's Posta is ready to ease your file-delivery phobias.

Pete Loshin

File transfer, whether it's done over old 300-bps dial-up lines or as file attachments to e-mail messages, is far from foolproof. Tumbleweed Software claims up to 50 percent of e-mail file attachments don't reach their destinations--that's why it created Posta.

The idea is simple: E-mail a URL and have the recipient get the file via the Web instead of having to figure out how to encode the file attachment (see the sidebar "Ma il-Attachment Troubles"). As a bonus, recipients download only the files they need.

Posta executes nicely on the user side. Receiving an attachment is simple and requires no special software at all: An attached file shows up in a message as a rather hairy-looking URL pointing to the file as it sits in a SQL database that you've set up on Posta Server. With Web-enabled e-mail clients, you're just a click away from opening the file remotely.

If you're licensed to send files with Posta, you can use a Web front end if your browser can upload files, or the Posta Desktop client if it can't. Account management is done through the Web, so if you have no browser you can send only attachments. Tumbleweed plans to integrate Posta into other e-mail clients and already has separate DLLs that add Posta to the Microsoft Office toolbar and to Visioneer scanning software.

Although the client side is easy to use, the server is tough to set up. Posta Server includes some SMTP server functions, but it needs your SMTP server and more: Windows NT Server 4.0, SQL Server 6.5, Internet Information Server 3.0, 64 MB of RAM, almost a gigabyte of disk space, and full TCP/IP services, including Domain Name System (DNS). You will need ex-pertise with NT Server, SQL Server, and TCP/IP; plus, you'll have to coordinate with firewall, proxy, and DNS configurations. Once you're done, though, administration through the Web interface, including account management, server monitoring, and configuration, is simple and straightforward.

Posta works, and it's a worthy solution to a pressing need. One little nit: Posta purchasers must submit their server's URL before getting a license, which seems overly protective and a potential source of problems for buyers who change server names down the road and forget to call Tumbleweed for a new license. My biggest complaint is Posta's lack of integration with my e-mail client, but that should be coming soon. If you've got the resources, your users will love Posta.

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Where to Find

Po
sta...............................$3999
 for server and 20 accounts

Additional seats................from $189
 each
 (Requires Windows NT Server, SQL 
  Server, 64 MB of RAM, and 1 GB 
  of disk space
Tumbleweed Software Corp.
Redwood City, CA
Phone:    415-369-6790
Internet: 
http://www.tumbleweed.com

Enter 1058 on Inquiry Card.

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Ratings

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Implementation	*	*	*	*
Key: ***** Outstandi ng, **** Very Good, *** Good, ** Fair, * Poor

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Il Posta for Revenue and Traffice Reduction

screen_link (30 Kbytes)

Reducing network traffic by charging for big e-mail file transfers is easy with a Posta pricing plan, administered through the server.

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Pete Loshin is a BYTE technical editor and author of Extranet Design and Implementation (Sybex, 1997). You can contact him at ploshin@mgh.com .