On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 2:42 PM, John Aldrich<jaldr...@blueridgecarpet.com> wrote: > Antivirus has to be told to overlook certain directories and you have > to have an "exchange-aware" antivirus or buy a special "plugin" for > the antivirus to allow it to scan the Exchange DB.
That's going to be true for most mail systems, to some extent. Even a system that uses the one-file-per-message approach isn't going to be happy if the AV software deletes files out from under it. And even the FOSS systems typically have something like a "plug-in" architecture for mail AV. Of course, you don't have to fork over big bucks to implement such a plug-in. You can easily hook it into your existing file-based AV solution. Unsurprising that the AV vendors don't like that. > Not to mention having to buy special add-ons for your archiving solution > just to back up the email store. > Oh, and while it's not a problem now, up > until the most recent version of Exchange, you couldn't have more than one > message store and if it got too big, it would virtually implode from being > so big. This I can't agree with. Exchange 2000 introduced multiple DBs (message stores), and I never saw it collapse just from size alone. The Standard Edition *did* have a limit of 16 GB, but that was for sales reasons. Microsoft wanted you to fork over more money for the Enterprise Edition to release that limit. And to gain multiple DBs. If your complaint is that Exchange is expensive to buy and expensive to run, no argument there. I never said it was cheap. :-) > On the reasons why I don't like Outlook, the 2 GB PST file size is a biggie. As others have said, that was addressed in Outlook 2003. However, the mailbox PST import/export tools for Exchange (EXMERGE and friends) *still* haven't caught up, AFAIK. (Unless they did something with PoSh in 2007 SP1. We're still Ex 2003 here.) But really, that speaks to your point: Big complicated databases need special tools, and without the special tools, you're dead in the water. When even *Microsoft* refuses to provide the special tools, you're really hosed. With simpler designs, it's feasible -- perhaps even the most sensible -- to just roll your own. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
