On 07/18/2018 10:10 AM, Tom Horsley wrote:
On Wed, 18 Jul 2018 15:07:50 +0000
Turritopsis Dohrnii Teo En Ming wrote:
> Does Exchange 2016 offer more user-friendly features or Linux-based
> SMTP servers?
The user controlled mail filtering in exchange is so pitiful that
it is useless. I run my own postfix/dovecot/fetchmail setup on my
desktop specifically to suck mail off the office365 server my company
uses and provide it to my linux mail client via dovecot so I can
use the dovecot sieve filtering.
For the most part, Exchange acts as an MTA and MDA server. It does have
a webmail interface that can be used as a user interface. For the most
part, the "user-friendly" bits are really on the MUA (mail user agent)
side (like Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.).
One really needs to understand how email works (MTA, MDA, MUA and so on)
to see where things go:
MTAs (Mail Transport Agents):
Sendmail, Postfix, Exchange, exim
MDAs (Mail Delivery Agents):
Dovecot, fetchmail, Outlook (fetch operations)
MUAs (Mail User Agents):
Outlook, Evolution, Thunderbird, mutt, pine, elm, mail,
mailx, MANY others
A user is going to interface with the MUA for the most part, so that's
where "user-friendly" is important and different MUAs offer different
look-and-feel characteristics. The MTA and MDA parts are normally
managed by the email administrator and really don't affect the user
experience (unless the MDA doesn't do something the user wants such as
supporting a MUA protocol like POP3 or IMAP or filtering appropriately).
I used to manage our email services for over 10K users. We used a load
balanced cluster of servers for sendmail as the MTA. Another cluster
provided MDA services via dovecot. Individual MUAs would talk to the
dovecot cluster for pickup and the MTA cluster for sending.
We did provide yet another cluster for webmail services using the Horde
suite (Imp, Kronolith, Turba, Nag). Squirrelmail is very similar to the
Horde suite and appears to be a bit easier to manage. All of the
clusters used a shared filesystem (Ibrix, which is now HP's StoreAll
system) so everything was consistent. You can do the same using NFS,
Gluster or some other shared filesystem.
Everything (except Ibrix) was FOSS, and once set up, really wasn't hard
to manage on a daily basis. Obviously, setting it up did take some
knowledge of how the whole thing worked, so it may not be for newbies.
Note that at the time I did this (geeze, like 15 years ago), things like
Gmail, Office 365 and many of the other cloud-based email systems did
not exist. We had to roll our own. Would I do it again? If we needed
complete control of things or our email requirements grew to a similar
number of "seats" that made a commercial product too expensive, yes.
I have the experience so it's not that daunting to me, but it's not
something I'd necessarily relish revisiting.
YMMV. Offer void where prohibited. Batteries not included. All of the
standard disclaimers.
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