short story version. microsoft sucks looking for a alternative to exchange server. what would this be. not seeing anything obvious right off the bat could someone point me in the right direction or directions.


ok here goes a the long story version. after our system administrator quit at my work a few months ago i have been assigned the job of slowly taking her position over. exchange server is one of my assigned responsabilities to learn. (I'm not qualified lets just say that much I'm just a CAD and mechanical designer guy, but how else do you learn but to jump in the middle and grab your nuts). i arrived at work at 7:00 this Monday morning to customer service complaining about not having email. so i checked out the exchange server. sure enough it was locked up frozen. so i waited about 8 min. still nothing locked up so what else is there to do but hit the power button right (now i thought about this one over and over again and i knew there could be major problems by doing this but what else could i do tough break man). when i rebooted the server the email services wouldn't start up and the log gave a specific error. microsofts knowledge base says the email data bases were corrupt. since this being the second time ever on the exchange server i decided to call our local tech support experts. they drove out ($125.00 a hour by the way). they ran some utilities to repair the email data base files. finally they get it up and going but there is a catch, we cant send and receive email attachment's now. our local tech support has no idea at this point and calls microsoft about the problem. you know what they told us since we could still send and receive email then it wasn't a emergency problem and that we are shit out of luck and they cant help us. 7 hours later and 875.00 dollars less and 2 days without email services to the company there still working on the problems. after reinstalling email services and service pack 4 we can receive email attachments but we cant send them.

So here i am looking for some solutions from the good old linux platform. does anyone have any starting points, what replaces the exchange server on the linux side of things. what kind of things do i need to be looking at i have no idea and would love to be working with linux instead of MS. if there is something what can be done if anything to migrating existing email from the exchange server.

OK. I guess I'll dive right in.

How many clients total?
Are you part of larger WAN (ie: other branch offices?)
Do you need groupware of some kind?
Do you want outside access to mailboxes (pop, imap, webmail client)?

mcleodnine,

we have 35 clients total right now and dont see us reaching anything over 45 but never say never so lets say under 100.

we are not part of a WAN

we need no groupware

we currently have no outside access but it might be nice for a few of use to be able to do this.

thanks for diving in,
AD

My guess is that you just want a mail server and you don't want to be a full-time admin.

I'd use postfix (if there's an RPM of it available for your RedHat release) and maybe a webmail interface (like squirrelmail)for outside access. SquirrelMail relies on a working IMAP server and the uw-imap is a pretty common one for most distros.

You should also have a look at qmail. It's well worth the effort if you have the time to learn it. You will need to build it from source and add a couple of other tools like daemontools and ucspi-tcp. More information on the process is avialble at the very thorough lifewithqmail.org site.

hey thanks man you have been really helpfull. sometimes its really nice to get other peoples input and advice before looking into things it can make a big difference.

thanks again,
AD

Look here http://www.tldp.org/

ouch.

HERE is an open source mail server comparison that may be helpful.

also search the site in my signature.

good luck

wow thanks for all the replies. lots and lots of studying to do. this helped alot gives me a starting point. do any of you have any experience with exchange server? if you do what do you think about it comapred to an open source mail server? i just cant believe we payed some guy 125.00 dollars an hour to run some automated utilites for repairing databases (compiling a kernel from source code takes more brains than what he had to do) and it still took 15 hours to get things back to normal again. finally microsoft pulled there hands out of there asses and gave some advise.

it seems i dont have any choice but to keep microsoft exchange server around. the higher ups just wont go for a change even after this. i need to do some reading first but im not sure if it is possible to intergrate existing mail into some open source alternitive choice that im searching for. but at the very least maybe there is a way to get exchange server to forward any mail recieved or sent to another server say
COURIER-MTA
EXIM
POSTFIX
SENDMAIL
QMAIL
and using it for a redundent back up system if exchange server should fail again? hmmm thats an idea. linux saving the day .

this is twice in 16 months that it has gone down. the other time was do to a virus. im not very impressed. but it is getting better it use to be about every other week.

thanks again,
AD

IMHO
1. Dont pay the tech support bill
2. Send tech support a bill for lost productivity.
3. Get tech support that KNOW what the hell they are doing.
4. Leave exchange where it is and learn how to use it.

Im am not an MS fan at all, I think they are overpriced industry ogres who will eventually go the way of the dinasour. However, exchange, when it isnt crashing, is a very encompassing product which I know of no Unix comparison. Reminders, calendars etc etc are all intergrated and although can be a hassle, once it is in place... might as well join'em rather than try to beat them.
Personnally, if I had a tech support company come out and charge money to get the product 1/2 fixed.. they would not get a red cent from me. Find a new tech support company.