Yes. There is a setup fee unless you prepay annually. The setup fee is 2 months if you wish to be billed monthly, and 1 month if you wish to be billed quarterly. The setup fee includes provision of one of our standard e-mail servers for use on your premises.

Service is month-to-month and you can cancel at any time on 30 days notice. We want you to be happy with our service.

In large part because more volume by you requires more data center computing resources from us. These are quite substantial, involving not only the data space and standby processing power itself, but also a percentage of actual throughput, as a result of peak-load failovers as well as broken routes. In addition to the above, there are nightly archive sets to another server in the same center (we are strong believers in Murphy's law, so we design to avoid the consequences of common points of failure). In addition, more fully utilized equipment intrinsically requires more administrative management.

Our standard mail server is built with mirrored 40gb disk drives, 512mb of RAM, and an Intel or compatible CPU with a throughput rating of 2ghz or better. Those with larger storage needs will receive a an equivalent model with 120gb drives.

Our service at the administrative level is complete, and includes all administrative work, hardware, software, and third-party services needed to maintain and repair the mail service, as well as full maintenance of backup service on our premises and all costs associated with this service.

We do not come onto your premises for this service. Thus, you need to have someone who can plug in the machine, install it in a rack if appropriate, and hit the reset button to power-cycle the machine. In the event the hardware breaks, you also need to have someone who knows their way around a screw-driver. Our design philosophy with mirrored drives is that when a server breaks, it is either 1 of the 2 drives we provide, or the rest of the box. Accordingly, when a server breaks, we send you a replacement box, and have someone on your premises move any "good" hard drives to the new box.

You must provide 2 separate static public IP addresses. To assure that your DNS service is as reliable as your e-mail service, if you do not presently have DNS mirrored in at least two places, we will either provide you free DNS service, or a slave to your current DNS service.

You also have to pay the costs of freight, both for the initial system, and for any replacement systems or components shipped. This lets us offer the same price for our services worldwide.

We will provide telephone support to your administrators and helpdesk personnel only. We do not provide end-user e-mail support except by separate supplemental fee.

We do. You will have to return the server at your own freight cost when the service terminates.

We do. All software provided must be destroyed or returned to us at termination of the service. Similarly, before a system is installed on your premises, you will have to execute a nondisclosure agreement specifically to protect our unique bomb-proof technologies.

Ordinary e-mail messages normally will take about 3 seconds to propagate. Longer messages take longer, but can move at speeds as fast as 500k bytes/second if you have adequate outbound bandwidth. Replication of changes is first-in/first-out. Thus, replication of newer, shorter messages, will be delayed by older, bigger, messages. If you have inadequate in-house bandwidth for your current mail system, this will slow down replication. However, on most premises outbound bandwidth is generally the least utilized.

We encourage use of IMAP storage because this protects old e-mail against loss, and also gives travelers remote access to their mail history. IMAP also permits users to download a local copy of mail for off-line work, if they desire.

We use Linux. Executing real-time replication with concurrent system access would be near-impossible in other operating system environments.

We use McAfee "Virus Scanner for UNIX"

We use Spam-assassin