The National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) is an apex institution accredited with all matters concerning policy, planning and operations in the field of credit for agriculture and other economic activities in rural India.

NABARD wanted to introduce a corporate mail solution that would enable its employees to manage their mail over the LAN and Webmail. "The bank was using dial-up connection and therefore, wanted to go for a third party web-based solution for corporate mailing," informs Neeraj Kumar, general manager (IT), NABARD. Mails were being provided on a department level, but the bank wanted a solution where every individual could have his or her own ID.

The bank was looking for a vendor which could provide a corporate mailing solution that would give each employee an individual address to access mail from anywhere. "We did consider other vendors and after consideration, we zeroed in on NetCore," Kumar says.

The bank was also looking for mail server software based on standard protocols with comprehensive online documentation which had indexed and searchable topics, and was accessible from the administrator interface and was also compatible with all desktop email clients. The bank also wanted the mailing solution to support connectivity via dialup or broadband to manage inter-office mail traffic by hosting the mailboxes on servers of the mail service provider.

NetCore built the software with the required customizations. The software was incorporated in the NetCore IDC with the following components: Emergic Clean Mail server, UUCP server and POP/Webmail server.

The Emergic Clean Mail (EMC) filters email traffic for protection from virus attacks and spam. This conserves bandwidth for NABARD as all unwanted mails are filtered at the Internet server.

The UUCP or Unix to Unix Copy is a suite of computer programs and protocols that enables remote execution of commands and transfer of files, email and news between computers. The clean mails are routed to the UUCP server, which maintains the accounts for all defined locations.

The POP/Webmail server can handle the demands of roaming users and a few district development offices that have a limited number of users.

Each office now connects to the Internet via dialup or broadband. The head office and a few regional offices have a mail gateway solution.

NetCore's Mail server has been installed at all locations and all mails first knock at the NetCore IDC, where they pass through the ECM servers for the necessary virus and spam filtering. Spam mails are deposited in a quarantine space on the ECM servers, which would only be accessible to the intended users via the spam digest feature of the ECM.

Mails filtered for spam are routed to the UUCP server, which acts as a central point in the architecture. It also does parallel processing, which includes performing location-wise look up. The mails identified with a specific location are pulled by the respective local mail servers at a pre-defined interval of five minutes. The local mail servers feature IMAP synchronization. Therefore, a copy of the email is always stored at the server.

Roaming users can access their mails using POP3/IMAP protocol from anywhere.

For confidentiality and data security, all data traveling through the NetCore network cannot be easily accessed. Detailed logs are maintained of the data that passes through the network, including logins and access to that data. Even the application and server interfaces are password protected over SSL encrypted tunnels.

Stuti Das
stutid@cybermedia.co.in

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