F/OSS Linux/Unix based solutions are every bit as robust as offerings from vendors like Microsoft, Novell, IBM and Sun/Oracle. In fact, they are generally as robust as the services you'd get from a large e-mail provider, which is not really surprising, as ISPs and providers often use those exact products.
That is not to say that setting up a rock solid solution is a trivial matter, but that's true for any product.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Guskab
Solution should provide integration with outlook for global address book and provide summary reporting of email activities,
Features also needed
Email queuing
Anti virus , anti spam
Global address book sync with outlook
Setting mailbox quotas
Support up to 1000 email boxes
Emails stored in database(preferably)
Access to email via web interface
Supporting multiple domains
Linking with active directory
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Email queuing: Not sure exactly what you mean by that, as all mail servers process mail in queues. If you mean "queuing mail until it can be delivered or fetched by a client", then sure, no problem.
Anti-Virus, Anti-Spam: With easy blocklist integration and plug-in support for advanced multi-scoring/bayesian filtering systems like SpamAssassin, sendmail, Postfix, Exim and Qmail will all work for you. As for anti-virus, just about any free or commercial antivirus product can be plugged into an SMTP gateway. So, no problem there either.
Global Address Book: Believe it or not, this is the closest you get to a major hurdle. Outlook prefers to speak MAPI/RPC with mail servers, and MAPI is a proprietary Microsoft protocol. Global Address Lists could easily be implemented through LDAP, but I'm not sure how well Outlook handles that, if at all.
OpenChange does speak MAPI, but it relies on Samba4 to do the AD integration and Samba4 is not yet in beta.
Mailbox Quotas: No problem.
Support up to 1000 mailboxes: You could do 10,000 or even 100,000 easily.
Emails stored in database (preferably): You know, I'm not so sure you really want that. Sure, it sounds nice and all, but for 1000 users you're not likely to run into performance issues with maildir. And maildir is just
so much easier to prune, extend, move, export, import, back up and restore (I'd take maildir and tar over Exchange and Backup Exec any day).
Access to mail via web interface: In the Unix/Linux world, things are often modular. So, too, with webmail frontends: They usually speak to an IMAP backend. Both webmail frontends and IMAP backends are plentiful. I don't know these products well enought to recommend one over the other, but I'm sure someone more experienced will chime in with an opinion. (I must say, though, that
Horde and
RoundCube both look really good.)
Supporting multiple domains: You won't find a product that doesn't do this.
Linking with Active Directory: Not as hard as one might think. Authentication can be done via LDAP or Kerberos. Address synchronization can be done via LDAP as well.
I see one real issue here:
- You want to have a Global Address List
- You want to continue using Outlook 2007
Each by itself is easy. Having both is a slight challenge. Using Outlook without MAPI (IMAP or POP) is not a pleasant experience. You lose the Global Address List and shared calender support is sketchy at best. You really need MAPI for Outlook to work properly, and that narrows your options considerably.
On the other hand, going for native Outlook support has its advantages, as you also get smartphone support across the board for free. AFAIK, OpenChange is the only truly free MAPI server implementation. There are other products out there, but you have to pay a license fee per mailbox.
Myself, I'm waiting for Samba4.
