most people dont even need all features of exchange. most people (even just for internal mail) will do quite happily with nothing more than a pop3 mail server.
even my work, which has pisses hundreds of thousands into exchange and hardware blah blah blah, could easily just use pop3 (even with exchange) and an ldap server for some address booking
Dean
Matthew Palmer wrote:
On Mon, Aug 16, 2004 at 02:49:34AM -0700, pesoy misak wrote:
Dear all
Well I just got a little story behind this question. I just succeed convince my customer that trying to do web design using ASP.net to use Linux using PHP yeaaahhh Linux Rulez. now seems I got a bit problem trying to convince this administrator to change all the system using linux. he is asking about the mail server for replacement for their exchange server 2003 that he said is the best (may be true) I just want to debate with this guy since I haven't much experience with mail server. he want to know the capabilities of each linux mail server and compatibilty and how much can the mail server handle like how much email etc, etc and how much size that it could handle
The first thing to realise is that most Linux mail servers aren't an integrated whole -- you build them together from the relevant bits -- pick an MTA that best suits your needs, bolt an MDA for your desired message storage format (if it's not supported natively by your MTA), and then put an IMAP/POP server on for retrieval.
This mix and match approach is useful, because you can (for instance) support sites with a relatively low rate of incoming mail, but a high rate of client-side IMAP access by choosing the right tools for the job.
There are a couple of integrated mail systems -- I think cyrus 2 is like this, and there's XMail and Courier, and a bunch of commercial ones like Communigate are like them. I hate the really tightly bound ones, because they're a big black box -- hmm, like Exchange.
Basically, you can easily build a mail server which will handle several times the volume of mail that Exchange will for a fraction of the *hardware* cost, let alone the licencing fees.
On the other hand, there is one thing that Exchange does that nobody else has managed to provide -- the complete basic "groupware" functionality and integration with Outlook. Outlook is (incomprehensibly) popular, and a lot of companies want/like the integrated shared calendars and address books, which really nothing else does.
And, when it comes down to it, your average click-monkey can usually fix
what's wrong with an Exchange server by either pointing and clicking (thus
accidentally fixing whatever they accidentally fucked up in the first place)
or by sacrificing a goat and reinstalling at the correct phase of the moon. No actual thought required in either case, which is an unpleasant side
effect of running a decent mail system (or server in general).
Oops, I think I'm frothing a bit. Hope I didn't get any on the carpet.
- Matt
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