Hi, While i agree with all your points above, and don't think that Exchange is the right product for a plain ISP-Mail setup, it isn't as bad as you're trying to make it.
* Andre Oppermann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > That's the problem. When an exchange server goes bad you're offline > for a couple of hours up to days. Exchange server stores everything That's what you have clustering for - besides when you got a file system problem on your storage backend, you're equally in trouble. > in one large linear database or log. Deleted mails are not really > free'd but just invisible. Every month or so you have to 'compress' > the message store to get the free space back. Compressing has to be > done offline so for two or three hours the server is unavailable. That's not correct. Basic defragmentation is done with an online (mounted) information store every 12 hours. There's no need for offline defragmentation, unless there's something wrong. > When this message store goes corrupt, which it does from time to time > just by itself, then it takes hours again to run a repair. I've seen corrupted linux filesystems, and corrupted exchange information stores. The reason for this was always the same: bad hardware. > they use it 24x7. As an ISP you don't really have the option of > generous maintainance windows as the corporate guys have (from 19:00 > to 06:00 plus weekends). While these generous maintenance windows are true for any SMB, they usually aren't for multinational coorporations. In the end, Exchange isn't the right product to provide ISP mail - it never was. At about 200CHF per CAL (price of course depending on a lot of things), it's also far too expensive. But if you're looking for a solid groupware, Exchange is definitivly the way to go. Microsoft fixed most of the problems Exchange had with the 2003 version, and went one step further with the 2007 version (which is almost out). _______________________________________________ swinog mailing list swinog@lists.swinog.ch http://lists.swinog.ch/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/swinog
