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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- - Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer, AllDigital ricks@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx - - AIM/Skype: therps2 ICQ: 226437340 Yahoo: origrps2 - - - - I.R.S.: We've got what it takes to take what you've got! - ---------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://getfedora.org/code-of-conduct.html List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/message/2KEMDTWKUUKCWEJDDEVZTVN2MJRDK4MD/
