Software.com launches major new version of its Post.Office Internet messaging server.

SANTA BARBARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 8, 1997--

Post.Office 3.0 Provides Internet Service Providers 

and Corporate Intranets With High Performance, Outstanding

Reliability in Easy-To-Manage Messaging Solution

Software.com, Inc., the leading provider of scalable Internet messaging server software, today introduced a major new version of its popular server product, Post.Office(TM). Post.Office 3.0 fulfills the messaging requirements of the thousands of regional Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and corporate intranets worldwide by providing greater performance and reliability, simplified management features, proven scalability, as well as essential feature enhancements.

More Capacity for ISPs

For regional ISPs, whose primary messaging requirements are scalability and reliability, Post.Office 3.0 can now effectively support growth toward 150,000 subscribers resulting from significantly greater message throughput performance than previous versions of Post.Office. Post.Office 3.0 also offers enhanced client session logging capabilities that allow system administrators to track messaging activity and monitor system response to peak traffic loads -- a critical capability for any ISP. This enables system administrators to adjust hardware resources as necessary to support increased user demands.

"Competition in the ISP marketplace is fierce, making the need for reliable e-mail systems that won't disappoint our customers a critical one. Software.com's Post.Office solution has enabled us to provide reliable messaging service to our customers for the past two years," commented Scotty McConnell, co-owner and systems administrator at ContiNet, a fast-growing, Oregon-based ISP. "The new List Manager simplifies the distribution of important messages to our clients, and has emerged as an additional service we can offer our customers, since they can take advantage of the messaging system's reliability to reach their own customers and contacts."

Simple Yet Powerful Features for Corporate Intranets

Post.Office 3.0 has also been enhanced to support the needs of corporate intranets, whose primary messaging requirements are not only scalability, but simple management features that provide reliable communications among user groups. To this end, Post.Office 3.0's full-feature, commercial-grade mailing List Manager offers simplified creation and administration of mailing lists for groups of users who share information on a common topic, supporting up to 30,000 separate user lists on a single server. All list-related operations can be handled through the web interface or through e-mail forms (or a combination of both), allowing list subscribers to review/subscribe to available mailing lists, change delivery modes, and perform search functions.

In addition, Post.Office 3.0 gives corporate intranets greater capacity levels (or, support that consistently meets user demand) at price-points found nowhere else in the Internet messaging industry. For example, Post.Office 3.0 offers customers significantly greater message throughput performance than the current version of the Netscape Mail Server, for half the per-user license price. A similarly-configured system will support 15 Post.Office users for every one Netscape Mail Server user at the same performance level, making the task of deploying and managing a large-scale e-mail system considerably simpler and less expensive. Further details of the comparison between Post.Office and Netscape Mail Server can be found on the Software.com web site at http://www.software.com .

"Post.Office 3.0 is the industry's first messaging server that delivers the level of performance and abundance of features required of a single-server implementation to dispel the notion that Internet e-mail is underpowered," said John MacFarlane, Chief Executive Officer of Software.com. "As a company committed to delivering native Internet e-mail servers that meet the demands of the internetworked economy -- including non-stop operation, performance that meets user demand, and management simplicity -- the launch of Post.Office 3.0 further substantiates our role as a provider of messaging products that scales seamlessly from 10 users to millions of users."

"In addition to making the setup and administration of Post.Office 3.0 even easier, Software.com has boosted the product's performance and scalability to support any level of user demand for Internet messaging," commented Mark Levitt, Research Manager, International Data Corporation. "This is good news for corporate intranets and regional ISPs for whom these features are of paramount importance."

Post.Office will include IMAP4 support in the third quarter of 1997. LDAP support will come from Software.com's recent partnership will Cisco Systems and is expected to be included in Post.Office before the end of 1997.

Solutions for Any User Community Size

Complementing Post.Office, which is currently running on over ten thousand servers supporting more than one and a half million users, is Software.com's InterMail(R) solution. As individual ISPs and corporate intranets push beyond the 150,000 user mark, these growing installations require messaging systems that can provide advanced scalability, availability and reliability. Software.com's InterMail is the only commercially available, native Internet messaging server that can deliver non-stop operation for these very large user installations, providing them with `dial-tone' caliber messaging. InterMail offers a smooth upward transition from Post.Office to support this high-end user growth. The combination of Post.Office and InterMail is unparalleled for offering ISPs and corporate intranets the assurance that -- regardless of the pace at which their user community grows -- they will be able to leverage the industry's leading messaging technology to meet any-sized user demand.

"There is tremendous corporate demand for extremely scalable POP servers -- Software.com is one of the few companies with product in this space. Software.com also fills a gap for the ISP market for ultra-scalability with the InterMail line," commented Matt Cain, vice president of Workgroup Computing Strategies at The Meta Group.

Pricing and Availability

Post.Office 3.0 is currently in beta testing and will be generally available later this month on all major Unix and Windows NT platforms. Post.Office 3.0 is priced at $495 for a 100 user license. A package consisting of 100 user licenses and 100 list licenses is $795. Additional packages of 100 lists are $495 each.

A special, limited-time promotion is available for qualified ISPs that purchase Post.Office 3.0 by September 30, 1997. For more information, please contact [e-mail] .

About Software.com

Software.com, Inc. is an Internet infrastructure software company whose mission is to provide high-performance, scalable server-based messaging solutions to Internet/intranet customers. The company has two industry leading products -- InterMail and Post.Office -- which provide server-based, native Internet messaging solutions to customers ranging from small businesses to large organizations with millions of users.

Software.com customers include, among others, AST Research, AT&T WorldNet(SM) Service, BBN Planet, Bell Atlantic, BSDI, Cisco Systems, Erol's Internet, Frontier Technologies, GE Information Services, Netscape, NetManage, Siemens Nixdorf Information Systems, Stratus Computer, and Banyan Systems. The company's headquarters are dual-located in Santa Barbara, Calif. and Lexington, Mass., with other offices in Orlando, Fla., Phoenix, Ariz., San Jose, Calif., Atlanta, Ga., Denver, Co., Seattle, Wa., Brussels, Belgium, Windsor, UK and Tokyo, Japan. Software.com can be reached in the U.S. at 805-882-2470 or http://www.software.com . -0-

Post.Office and InterMail are trademarks and registered trademarks of Software.com, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks and service marks are the property of their respective owners.

CONTACT: Software.com Inc. Copithorne & Bellows

Steven Karlson Tim Hurley/Carolyn Wilkins

617-674-0100 x224 617-450-4300

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