Opinions on Exchange options

[jludwig]

On Tue, 2004-04-13 at 11:42, redhat wrote:
> First - forgive the length of this post...I am going to throw this out
> there for whomever wants to respond.  I have an Exchange 5.5 server
> which is my PDC (primary authentication and email - internal only)
> running on server 2000.  Last year it crashed because it mysteriously
> forgot that it was the PDC and I had to rebuild it from scratch.  Now, I
> am having serious issues with Exchange mail and am getting tired of it. 
> I am required to offer calendaring, shared contacts, yadda, yadda,
> yadda.  I have looked at SuSE's offering and have also looked into a
> product called bynari.  Both seem to offer the right stuff - at a hefty
> price - comparable to M$.  I don't mind the price but I want to be sure
> that in another year I am not back in the same position with problem on
> a different platform.  I don't have anyone on staff that can set up
> Sendmail and I don't have the time to learn it.  I need something that
> is intuitive enough to set up and administer.  If you are familiar with
> either of these products I would appreciate pros and cons.  If you have
> a different product that does not require 3 brains to setup and
> administer I would appreciate that as well.
> thanks,
> DF
Check out qmail for one. There are a lot of options in Linux in general,
including mail servers. 

If you are skilled in any flavor of Unix the move over to Linux is not
hard. 

There are also GUI's for mail setup from what I understand, though I
have never used any. Also help is abundant.

As far as crashes and such, Linux in gerneral is probably the most
stable platform available, and not as resource intensive as other
operating systems, and reconfigures very easilly. This would allow you
to use an "older" machine for setup and test and move the drive to the
main system as long as the architectures are the same. I used to do this
regularly. 

-- 
jludwig <wralphie at comcast.net>