Merce provides an enterprise email infrastructure. One or more Merce servers can work in a synchronised manner to provide email services for small or large organisations. This facility provides location-independent email addresses, i.e. all users in a company will have email addresses of the form user@companydomain.com irrespective of which location or office they work out of. Merce will hide the location information, and will internally route each user's email to the correct server.

Merce mail servers support POP3 and IMAP4 for mailbox access, and SMTP for outgoing emails. All three services may require authentication, which will work with the single Merce username and password.

Emails in Merce can be archived on the server for future record. A copy of each incoming and outgoing email is archived in a special mailbox on the server and can be accessed by an authorised system administrator. If an employee leaves the organisation, his emails are available in this archive for future reference. If a company uses insecure or unstable desktop computers whose contents periodically get wiped out due to viruses or hardware faults, then old email will not be lost forever; they are there in the central archive on the Merce server(s).

Merce tracks and reports email traffic volumes. The system administrator gets reports of total email traffic, with per-user figures. Like all Merce reports, these are consolidated across all sites and servers and integrated into one location for an enterprise-wide view.

Merce can perform virus checking of all messages on the fly. Virus signature databases are downloaded from the Internet automatically and updated on all Merce servers at frequent intervals, to ensure effective virus filtering.

Merce provides multi-site IM (instant messaging) infrastructure. Users on the corporate WAN can chat with each other using their Merce usernames and passwords. A variety of IM protocols are supported, and most of the popular IM clients will interoperate with the Merce IM service. Chat transcripts are saved on servers and are made available to the chat participants.

Merce can provide controlled Web access to users. The keyword here is "controlled". Merce provides various features which allow an organisation to decide its Internet access policies. This allows you to provide Web access for business purposes but cut down wasteful and non-essential business access, e.g. enormous time spent on checking cricket scores or online share trading. This not only improves employee productivity, it also reduces the bandwidth needed for Internet links, thus saving money for the enterprise while improving profitability.

Different groups of users often need different sets of access restrictions to browse the Web. This is supported by Merce. Restrictions include which sites a user can access, from which desktop (based on its IP address), and during which hours of the day or week.

In a Merce-enabled enterprise, Web access requires typing in the user's Merce username and password. Access is granted or denied based on the username or on the computer's location or IP address. Thus, a user gets to experience a uniform set of access rights when he accesses the Web, irrespective of which desk he is sitting at today.

Users' accesses may be bandwidth limited, to ensure that unrestricted Web browsing does not deplete Internet bandwidth for more important users or services. Bandwidth limiting can be imposed based on the desktop's IP address, the user's identity, time of day or week, or the site being accessed.

System administrators can see a near-real-time view of Web access activity across the enterprise. They can see which user is browsing which site from which desktop.

Web content is filtered by virus filters.

Web access is tracked and reported. The accesses initiated by users at all sites are consolidated into aggregate reports, with details per user and per Website. If a user accesses the Web from various offices of the company, all of these accesses are aggregated into the consolidated report under his user ID.

A user on Merce can register a reminder request for a specific date. Merce will send her the reminder by email on the given date. A user on Merce can register a vacation message, which will be sent out automatically to anyone who writes email to her, whenever an email comes into the Merce user's mailbox. A user may also choose to forward her own incoming emails to any other user, or to an external account outside the enterprise.

When a Merce user writes email to anyone else in her enterprise, the mail client can look up the Merce address book on the fly. This is provided using the LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) service and all modern email clients support it. Merce automatically synchronises its user database with its LDAP servers when users are added or deleted.