StarNine and Microsoft jointly announced last week that StarNine will assume all responsibilities for the moribund Microsoft Mail (now called StarNine Mail), including development, marketing, sales, and support. When StarNine Mail starts shipping within 30 days, it will include a 10-user copy of StarNine's Mail*Link Remote UUCP gateway to the Internet. Users interested in an SMTP gateway for a dedicated Internet connection can use StarNine's Mail*Link SMTP for Microsoft Mail. Interestingly, given Microsoft Mail's proprietary nature, StarNine has committed publicly to open Internet standards. David Thompson, StarNine's director of marketing, said, "StarNine's server strategy calls for all of our MacOS servers to be accessible by any commonly used, open standards (i.e. Internet) client, whether it's our Web server, mailing list server, or email server." I'll let you interpret that statement as you will, but think about the possibilities of using the Web for remote access to email.

Pricing for StarNine Mail will stay roughly the same, at about $270 for the server, $270 for a 5-user license, and $900 for a 20-user license. You can receive email updates about the transition by sending email to <starnine-announce@starnine.com> with the word "subscribe" in the Subject line (you can also discuss the future of the product there with the product managers and engineers). Information about the transition will be available on the company's Web server.

http://www.starnine.com/

StarNine -- 800/525-2580 -- <info@starnine.com>