CEVI NV was originally a non-profit local government organisation based in Belgium, operational since 1976. There mission was to provide solutions for automating administrative tasks for finance, tax, police and community functions and processes. In 1999, the Dexia Group, a leading Belgium banking organisation, participated in Cevi NV.

CEVI has established a TCP/IP network with centralised managed connections to their partners and clients. There are approximately 180 local government sites with more than 3000 connected hosts. They have some centralised processes running on Siemens mainframes and some Unix minicomputers.

They are evolving towards more openness at the network level, moving away from an expensive private network to an Internet based network on a much larger scale. The biggest problems facing them at present are the security aspects and the appropriate service levels. There will be a reduced level of proprietary solutions and a strong move towards standard protocols such as WEB (http/https), Email (smtp/pop3/imap4). It is their belief that Email should be the general infrastructure for person-to-person (P2P) and business-to-business (B2B) communications, and that the evolution towards legally recognised digital certificates for P2P, P2B, and B2B transactions will stimulate the use of email as a universal tool for these types of transactions. A 'store and forward' approach to information delivery, rather than staying permanently on-line to the Internet because of the reducing bandwidth capacity already being stretched to the limits by current usage of the Internet without allowing for the exponential growth of demand. People are already becoming familiar with email as a tool because it is simple to use and very effective, and it is much more secure than other tools such as FTP.

To achieve these goals they did some research on the Internet and discovered MailRules. They started with a pilot project to test the product.

The concept was very simple. At the customer site, the application writes some files with transactions attached to the MailRules Outbound folder (one MailRules per customer site). Those files are emailed to the central site (CEVI) where another MailRules capable PC receives the email and writes the files to an 'Inbox folder' for an application. This application uses these files in one or more batch processes on the mainframe or Unix computers. The output of these processes provides a file for MailRules to pass the results back to the central site for dispatch by another MailRules process back to the client site.

It was important to CEVI to use MailRules as a stand-alone email client and they are only using the Advanced Rules within MailRules as they require the compression, encryption and file splitting at the client end as the files being emailed are much larger than the ISP imposed file size restriction of 3MB maximum. These files are then re-constituted at the central site before passing to the batch processes.

"MailRules is the best product we have found to achieve the tasks required, in a most cost effectively way, secure and totally automated with little or no actions at the client end for expensive technical support," said Stefaan Pouseele, the technical project manager for CEVI.

The second project was to automatically transfer the results of the local body elections in the Flanders (Dutch speaking region of Belgium) between 3 sites. This project, with a short lifetime of 4 months, is already successfully completed.

The next project is a permanent project for automatically transferring transactions for a Human Resource Management application between our local body clients and the central database at CEVI.

"We are certainly looking forward to the new updated version of MailRules, this will provide a more user friendly front-end, as well as additional functionality and features, especially the use of prefixes/aliases and in the next release, additional security such as OpenPGP and S/MIME." stated Stefaan.