Re: [Exim] Exchange looming..

Jeff Breitner wrote:

> My sympathies.
>
> For just email, the benefits of Exchange are outweighed by the sheer
> weight of its baggage. I do like the lightning fast indexing and
> searching of email, but this is hardly the scope of a MTA (and I argue
> that Cyris IMAP is just as fast). And I admit that most of the mail for
> my domain flows through Exim and then onto the Exchange server simply
> because of the intense filtering and spam prevention tricks that Exim
> has up its sleeve.
>
Our setup is very similar; we're using Exchange for shared calendars,

but it's simpler and cheaper to use exim for actual MTA features. You

have to remember that anything you add to Exchange in the way of spam
prevention or other features is probably going to cost you some bucks.

But I must mention also that I had a user whose outgoing E-mails were
lost randomly by Exchange. There was nothing in Exchange's logs that
told me why, and other E-mails to the same recipients went out fine.
The only recourse in a situation like that is to hope that the next SP
fixes the problem, and SP2 most certainly didn't. You can't dig into
the code and see why something is happening.

When I used exim as an intermediary between her and Exchange, the
problems went away. Go figure.

For such reasons, if the management here did not insist on the
calendaring stuff, and that it be through Outlook, I would not recommend
Exchange.

In the interests of objectivity, I must mention that the calendaring
stuff works fine; also Exchange gives you OWA, its version of web mail,
which is also pretty convenient at times. Also, the POP connector
offers a fetchmail-like way of grabbing mail from a POP server, then
offering it up to your user using native Exchange, POP, IMAP, or OWA.

Exchange as a mail server does not really tie you to Microsoft products,
as far as I can tell. It offers POP, IMAP, and SMTP. (You haven't
lived until you've viewed your Exchange mail under mutt using IMAP.)
OWA even works pretty well under Netscape.

I think Microsoft's idea is that the groupware features (especially if
you simply *must* use Outlook) force you to buy Exchange, which forces
you to buy Win(2K|NT), etc.

The big question is: Can something that complex and closed-source, no
matter how impressive, be trusted with regards to dependability and
security? Especially when *you can't fix it*.