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HP's OpenMail: I'm Not Dead Yet
Jon Hill writes "It looks as if HP's OpenMail system is not dead yet and development of the project has been assumed by Samsung's software division. This is great news considering OpenMail was the only serious Unix-based competitor to Microsoft Exchange. Now if only it was strongly marketed and made well known, enterprise administrators such as myself could embrace it." For those of not familiar, essentially OpenMail is the *only* e-mail platform out there, besides Exchange that will support a whole slew of Microsoft Outlook features - something necessary in the enterprise, despite that people should know better.
I've never used Exchange, so I'm seriously interested in what people like about it. Why do companies feel it's better than a standard IMAP/LDAP setup?
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
a whole slew of Microsoft Outlook features - something necessary in the enterprise
Can somebody tell me what these features are, compared to what you'd get with sendmail/qmail / some-random-pop/imap-client ?
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
Sheesh... If all of you weren't so damn scared of Lotus Notes. Runs on Linux, S/390, Solaris, NT, ASS/400 (yes, the extra S is there on purpose), and others I'm sure I'm forgetting.
It may be a bit different from what you're used to, but it supports, IMAP, POP3, SMTP, and HTTP(S) methods to access your mail easily..
viruses.
viruses
viruses
With exchange the calendar is shared between users, so you can do things like schedule meetings without having to phone round first.
The Evolution calendar stuff has all the features needed except that your calendar isn't accessible to other users.
Hopefully someone will write a free iCal server and an evolution backend to it.
-- Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold.
Don't forget there's another reader available that hopes to be a replacement for Outlook also.
Actually, that link does serve some purpose - the entire tone of the article is very amusing given that the vulnerability was fixed 2 days later, and is worth re-reading with that in mind to see the sort of crap and guesswork people will write.
I've been trying to convince them that 'proper' email is text only, and attachments if you are completely ftp-impaired but to no avail. They seem to insist on 200Mb attachments (sent to 30 other users no less...)
Get with it!
Information Technology exists to serve the needs of users, not the other way around.
If your users want to send 300Mb attachments to each other then propose to them the infrastructure and funding requirements of such a platform rather than shouting "ftp!" to their hands (because sure as hell the face ain't listening).
There is a massive gap between what most sys admins think of themselves and what their userbase actually thinks of them. This is a dangerous place to be in, and no amount of name calling will change their attitude.
Deliver what the users want within reasonable expectations and the prospect of a career *not* sitting in the wiring cupboard beckons, with all the rewards that can come (CTO anyone?!)...
Exchange is actually one of Microsoft's best products. Unlike the NT registry and SAM database it's based on LDAP and a dumbed down SQL database engine. In addition to the workgroup features like calendars, team folders, public folders it has a ton of other great features.
One is called Deleted Item Retention Time. You set the number of days and when a user deletes an email it's not really deleted for the specified days. If he realizes he made a mistake restoration is from the Outlook client and takes seconds saving the admin time from going to the back up tapes. For businesses like law firms it's a life saver since they are required to keep records and emails for five years or so. They simply buy a lot of storage and set a deleted item retention item of 1600 days or so and it's a secondary back up.
A second feature is single instance storage. You send a file out to 50 people it gets stored once in the database saving you storage space.
Then third party back up programs have a feature called brick level back up's where you can back up individual mailboxes. If you delete on by accident restoration is simple. Exchange 2000 has this feature out of the box.
Exchange is scalable. It's overkill for small offices and I've supported it for a government agency with 35,000 employees and 300 Exchange servers. It scales very well.
A good Exchange anti-virus program like Trend Micro Scanmail 3.7 has file blocking features and greatly eases the management of your anti-virus strategy.
Since email is in a database searching for messages is easy.
And the global address book is great. Users don't have to keep their own huge address book and greatly minimizes the calls to the admin of I sent out this email but it came back returned and asking you to track down an email address.
Sure you can cobble together a few products for most of the functionality and perform some of the usability features manually, but you'll spend more time while the CEO is asking you to restore an email from a year ago.
We use OpenMail. I read about the discontinuing development last February with much sadness.
When I heard about the deal with Samsung a few weeks ago (we got a letter), I was pleased. I had already read what Bruce Perens had said about open sourcing it...it just wasn't going to happen. He would've like it to (as would I) but there was too much code licensed from third parties, etc. that would have to be re-written before it could be open-sourced, and the whole point was: they weren't developing it anymore.
At any rate, when I came on board at my present employer, the front end client (Outlook) was deeply embedded into the environment here. I am still working on weening people off of it. But the great thing about OpenMail is that I can let them keep Outlook if they want. Believe it or not, when dealt with properly, Outlook is not so bad. The end-users love it. They really don't know and don't care what happens behind the scenes.
OpenMail gives me the flexibility to use any IMAP/LDAP client I want, or the web interface if I so choose, or Outlook. It lets the Outlook users have a system directory, shared folders, and shared calendars...all nice features...without buying into Exchange. It also lets me control what the Outlook users can do. Every time they connect to the server, I can send them a MOTD, reset their security settings to my way, and force all incoming/outgoing mail to be plain text if I so please. I can limit the size of their mailboxes, and I can set up gateways to just about every other type of messaging system I want. I can scan for viruses in attachments at the server and force Outlook to block all attachments of an executable type...whether the server detects a virus or not.
As for the administrative tools, the command line tools are the bomb, but take some getting used to...and the GUI admin client basically sucks.
Overall, I love OpenMail and was glad to pay for the licenses. We have about 100 users hitting the server via Outlook, Netscape Mail, the Web interface, and we even have a whole department with old DOS PCs, accessing their mail via a packet driver and PC-PINE!!! (They refuse to upgrade because it works for them and as the adage goes...if it ain't broke, don't fix it.)
The other downside is that it means users need to use .pst files (this is what some sales guy for Openmail said, it may have changed by now) and PST files can be bad (especially #1) With Exchange you can store everything in the server's database which makes it easier to back up.
You need a customer friendly attitude in this business. The user doesn't care about computers. He want to get his work done in the shortest amount of time and then surf the internet. He already has enough on his or her mind about their job and they don't want to remember a bunch of obscure ftp commands. They just want to point and click.
I'm sure that it's probably filled with security holes, but it seems fair to point out that one was fixed long ago.
The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference between a mermaid and a seal. (Mark Twain)
There will always be limits.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
I researched for days looking for a Linux/BSD based Open-source solution for this functionality, and I didn't find anything even remotely close. I tried to get OpenMail, but HP has shut down the download area so you can't get it anymore. Products like Evolution are slick and have a good email interface, but are single-user only calendaring systems, with no (automated) group coordination at all. Frankly, I find this type of functionality critical in a company of even 8 employees: I just don't see how companies can get along without some kind of group calendaring solution.
This is definately a major gap in the overall functionality of Open Source software in general, which is one reason why Exchange/HP OpenMail/Lotus Notes will continue to thrive.
Please Rate my comment (and help support Fre
OK, the UI for 4.x was pretty awful. 5 is a lot better - although there are some odd things in there. If it confuses you because you're only used to Outlook, well, too bad.
We use Notes throughout for a lot more than just mail/calendar and we don't get many problems at all. As well as support for all that stuff mentioned above, there's also stuff like S/MIME - with the ability to use the NAB as an LDAP server for picking up public keys etc.
Good administrators can keep it running flawlessly (ours don't do that badly either). We've never had an e-mail virus problem - if you install/configure MAPI to use Notes, then yes, that could be a problem, but why on earth would anyone want to do that?
This sig made only from recycled ASCII
U of Kansas needs to either hire some decent admins or put some policies in place. The Southern European Task Force deployed MS Exchange back in 1997 and we had problems for the first few years. But it was because there were no mailbox limits set and they kept running out of disk space. It's all in the admins.
Bill G.: Bring out yer dead!
HP:'Ere you go...
Open Mail:I'm not dead yet
HP:What do yer mean, yer ready to go at any time!
Open Mail: I'm getting better!
Bill G.: I can't take thi$, it'$ not GUI reliant nor i$ it a real threat to my monopoly!
Open Mail: I feel happy! I feel fine!
[THUD]
HP: Thanks a lot!
Users: Do you see them oppressin' me?
(wink wink nudge nudge know what I mean)
Please let me plug two products for a moment. The first is MailOne (descended from DEC's MailWORKS). Except for the Calendar/Groupware functions, it also supports Exchange/Outlook clients (including address book) as well as POP and IMAP (plus a command line and Motif client). Runs on Linux, AIX and Tru64.
The second is Direct21, an email migration tool. If you are trying to get off of OpenMail (or on, I think) this tool will do that quickly and easily.
Both can be found through the website.
324006
A networking group in my clec used to keep a calendar in an MDB database. Once they screwed it up and I had to restore from back up tape. I made them a calendar on our exchange server, they love it and I haven't heard from them in weeks.
In USASETAF we had thousands of users on each exchange server and except for running out of disk space because of no mailbox limits it worked well. But that was the admins and a political issue. My office in US Army Corps of Engineers we had 140 users on ours and only had one problem in the year I was there. But isinteg works very well. My present job we have a server with over 300 users and a ew other servers with 150 users each. All works well. I never touch exchange except to make new mailboxes or delete terminated employees.
The main thing is the hardware. You need a good SCSI adapter and plenty or RAM. 512MB is good enough for 140 users.
We use OpenMail. I read about the discontinuing development last February with great happiness.
My servers run NT. I would have preferred *NIX but it would have taken another year or two of paperwork to get the purchase order for *NIX boxes through management. I want my servers to send email notifications when certain events occur. Normally, I would just use the windows messaging API. Unfortunately, the OpenMail MAPI drivers refuse to resolve addresses outside of Outlook. I get a lot of 'net send' messages these days.
In client side processes, I was able to automate email. I had to get a reference to an Outlook folder and use that to create and send the message, but it works. Mostly. Trying to send a message to Doe, John when there is also a Doe, John C. in the OpenMail address book gives an ambiguous address error.
The real problem with anything from HP is that they couldn't write a decent driver if their life depended on it.
I like how it corrupts its Jet (Access) database and loses email. I also like the "bad message" feature that crashes store.exe. And the extremely slow message delivery via IMAP. Oh, and the open relay feature.
35,000 mailboxes on 300 servers, huh? Wow, that's like, 116 mailboxes per server. Yeah, scales really well. You would need a multiple of that number of machines if you ran an SMTP/IMAP/LDAP setup on Unix. Of course, the multiplier would be something like 0.01, but...
I've found that not using Outlook and Exchange greatly eases my anti-virus strategy. I suppose if you have a global address book of 35,000 people, 20 of whom any given person would need to actually correspond with, then you reall want to keep those Melissa-type microsoft viruses under control.
We used a unix-based email system at my previous company, and hey! I could back up individual mailboxes. "Brick level backup." Snort. And since email was stored in regular files, searching for messages was easy. My CEO had dat tapes going back into the 80s with his email on it.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
One is called Deleted Item Retention Time. You set the number of days and when a user deletes an email it's not really deleted for the specified days. If he realizes he made a mistake restoration is from the Outlook client and takes seconds saving the admin time from going to the back up tapes. For businesses like law firms it's a life saver since they are required to keep records and emails for five years or so. They simply buy a lot of storage and set a deleted item retention item of 1600 days or so and it's a secondary back up.
Just out of curiosity, how do you get an email back when it's deleted when the only thing on tape is a collection of large proprietary binary files which make up the entire private mail store?
Then third party back up programs have a feature called brick level back up's where you can back up individual mailboxes. If you delete on by accident restoration is simple. Exchange 2000 has this feature out of the box.
Answered my own question, I suppose. :-)
And the global address book is great. Users don't have to keep their own huge address book and greatly minimizes the calls to the admin of I sent out this email but it came back returned and asking you to track down an email address.
Perhaps I'm using it totally wrong but at least in Exchange Server 5.5 the GAL is for local mailboxes only. This was years ago but we had to create a public folder and use Outlook to store contacts in it.
Sure you can cobble together a few products for most of the functionality and perform some of the usability features manually, but you'll spend more time while the CEO is asking you to restore an email from a year ago.
I'll be the first to admit that Exchange Server and Outlook are one killer combination. However like I have stated several times over the years, I'll be god-damned if I'm going to lock up my company's data like that. The data store is proprietary. The access tools are proprietary. Maybe I'm getting old and crochety but I've been bit before (too many times in fact) to just let it go. I want to be able to get the format of the data files and protocols so that when I want to do X I can go do it, hire someone to do it or otherwise do what the hell I want with my data, when I want and without some motherly giant cooing "Now now, dear. You don't really need to do it like that."
I couldn't agree more. I've been spending all of my free time putting together documents and a plan to get my company to switch to Linux workstations and Linux/*BSD servers. It's a major multi-national corporation, and if we slowly migrate (successfully), I guarantee it'll be documented in at least a few industry publications.
My point being that if IT managers and developers see articles of success, cost cutting, and other improvements, their interest peaks. Doesn't matter what platform or language it's about. All you need to do is raise their interest so maybe others will try the same, and once it's visible enough, others will come into the market to compete with software like this.
I sure hope my company will look beyond Microsoft... and I'm going to do everything in my power to make management aware of their options.
Developers: We can use your help.
>Except for the Calendar/Groupware functions
/need/ the shared calendar. They have nokia 9110's / wince devices etc and they want it all to synch with outlook. So you can argue with them until you are blue in the face that they won't all use the calendar and this and that but in the end it only takes a few dedicated users on a user group plus one manager to crack and hey ho you need to be evaluating notes and the insight/trade server from bynari otherwise you'll have exchange by the end of the month :-)
And therein lies the rub - and this goes for all the others above who are plugging imap as the solution.
The users say they
I work for a Very Large Organization that uses Openmail in parts of itself, and Exchange in others. When HP announced they were knifing Openmail, this gave some people the excuse to start planning the switchover.
So, now it's not being knifed. I made sure to get this information to my boss, who is going to pass it on to other people today, to read, review, and spit bile over, because now the reason for their pet project going through is negated. And it means we're not going over to Exchange, which is, pretty much, a good thing overall, even if having two different email systems between the parts of the corporation that merged together is a Really Not Very Good Thing.
I love the sound of an entire Fortune 10 corporation's IT management and planning group having a collective stroke, especially when I gave the information that causes the stroke. It really makes my mornings worth it some days.
Brazil has decided you're cute.
Agreed. Domino.doc does this on top of Notes/Domino. It even replaces all the Office save dialogs so they have to save it into a repository. For the real sticks in the mud that resist, it even has an explorer looking 'My Domino.doc' icon that they can drag documents into.
We have had similar issues...and that address resolution is probably the one thing about OpenMail that has been a bother, now that you mention it. But, we worked around it in this way:
1. Ensure every user has a valid and unique internet e-mail address
2. send e-mails via SMTP when events occur.
3. Use aliases or distribution lists so you're sending e-mails to roles instead of names (like admin or support instead of Doe, John)
We do this for several applications and it works fine.
I have a suspicion that the quirky UI is partly a consequence of the cross-platform nature of the product. It looks like it's coded in C/C++ using a cross-platform library of some sort. Since you can replace the entire UI with something custom-written in Java (and I've known people who've done this) then if people find it that offensive then they can do something about it.
The core product is pretty good though. We have a few hundred in-house developed databases which do everything from discussion to complex workflow. We don't have many problems. Once you've got it set up, being able to pick a bunch of people and a room for a meeting, then hitting "find free time" (although, god knows, this is beyond most project managers) is cool. Oh, and our web stuff runs on it as well.
In response to the AC reply, you can fix the daylight saving. I'll admit we did have a problem with the fact that the states and the UK didn't change at the same time, but that's sorted now.
This sig made only from recycled ASCII
I'm still holding ot for a ximian evolution server.
As far as I'm concerned, this will have the same problem that Exchange Server has: its coolest feature (calendaring) is supported in the Linux client only.
Our enterprise is about evenly split between Windows users and Mac OS X users-- we recently went through a huge rush of employees buying new iBooks. Any email/messaging/whatever platform that requires a specific client must provide that client for both of those operating systems for it to be useful to our company.
I'm this --> <-- close to giving up and doing the whole thing on the intranet with PHP and Postgresql.
Just tell them that it _is_ exchange (honest) and they'll shut up and go away, happy that they've thrown a buzzword at you that makes them look knowlegable.
And then one of them will try to schedule a meeting with the group calendar feature, only to find that his Outlook isn't configured for Exchange after all, and he'll be all confused. He'll call you for help.
If you worked for me, I'd fucking fire you on the spot.
Lying to your users-- whether they're your peers or your bosses or your subordinates-- is never okay.
Back up software has a MS Exchange aware back up agent for online backups. We use Veritas Netback up datacenter. As for deleted item retention time it was introduced in SP3 and all you have to do is go to deleted items folder, click on tools menu and select restore deleted items. You then get a choice to restore a single message or multiple messages.
As for the GAL you can either create custom receipents or setup directory synchronization with other organizations. It's more a feature for government agencies and companies with thousands of employees.
The Admins @ the University of Kansas are probaly a pack of morons.
Where I work we run one of the larger Exchange systems in the country, about 100,000 named and 65,000 active users. There are plenty of problems to go around, but uptime isn't one of them.
The current uptime is about a month, because a pipe burst in the server room, forcing a shutdown. It was up about two months before that.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Every time they connect to the server, I can send them a MOTD, reset their security settings to my way, and force all incoming/outgoing mail to be plain text if I so please.
How does that work, exactly?
If the message includes both an HTML part and a text part, I guess you could strip the HTML part and assume the text part contains the entire message.
But what if there is only the HTML part? Does OpenMail (or whatever does what you referred to) just change the MIME type but leave the content alone? Then every recipient will get an email full of raw HTML source, and the user won't know until he starts getting complaints from recipients-- obviously non-optimal.
Or does OpenMail try to somehow intelligently convert the HTML into plain text, dropping all the formatting but keeping important things like line and paragraph breaks?
Either way, I'd expect that it wouldn't work all that well. Is there something going on with OpenMail that allows it to do what you said in some way that doesn't destroy messages?
Forgot to add The US Army Corps of Engineers has 35,000 employees in the US, Europe, Asia, Middle East and South America. And they don't have a full ATM backbone with unlimited bandwith. THe still use frame relay on a lot of circuits so local exchange servers are a must.
I'll be the first to admit that Exchange Server and Outlook are one killer combination. However like I have stated several times over the years, I'll be god-damned if I'm going to lock up my company's data like that. The data store is proprietary. The access tools are proprietary. Maybe I'm getting old and crochety but I've been bit before (too many times in fact) to just let it go.
... I suspect with a few more jerks of the costomer's chain by Microsoft this fact will become even more apparent to many more people and companies down the road, when years of corporate records and correspondence are at stake because of soemthing as asinine as a file format change, rather than merely a few tens of documents that are suddenly inconvinient for the secretary to access.
You are absolutely, 100% correct. This is our company's policy as well, both for development products and (most importantly) data: it cannot require a proprietary product that would, under any circumstances, leave us beholden to any vendor, no matter how benevolent. Let's face it, the nicest, most well meaning vendor in the world can, through no fault of their own, be run out of business. Indeed, likely by a much less benevolent vendor who would just love to keep your data hostage *cough*Microsoft*cough*.
On a personal level I was using Applix Word on GNU/Linux. A great, albeit proprietary, software suite for office applications and a wonderful word processor. Not as bloated as Microsoft Word, yet having many of the snazzier features that actually facilitate getting one's work done. I was using it extensively while working on a novel and screenplay I'm writing.
I dumped it.
Not because of any missing features, or price, or anythnig like that, but because, one day, it was reluctant to start. Turned out I'd clobbered a font it wanted when doing a dist-upgrade against debian-testing (the next apt-get fixed it, but th e whole event scared me). I had, for a few minutes, the horrifying feeling that weeks of work had just become as inaccessible to me as the surface of the moon.
Once I got Applix running again I converted everything to HTML, then spent several days cleaning up the crappy HTML Applix generates, into a more readable and maintainable format. Not the handiest format for word processing around, but adequate and, most importantly, very accessible. I will never fear loosing my hard work again. What is more, now that I've finally gotten around to learning some emacs (something I've been procrastinating for years) I find I can work with HTML files as quickly and conviniently as I was the Applix stuff, within the self-imposed limitations that HTML implies.
You are 100%, absolutely correct. Data is by far the most valuable asset on a computer (exceeding the value of the hardware and software combined in most cases), and storing it in anything other than an open, non-proprietary format is a recipe for disaster. It appears this is becoming aparent to industry already
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Personally I don't want to muck up my email with a bunch of unrelated things, like calendars. It probably appeals to the PHB sort, but I can't the use in this stuff. I like my email the good old way, plain text.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
One word: Calendaring.
As much crap as LookOut/Exchange does, there is no other piece of software that seamlessly integrates the groupware automated scheduling functionality that Exchange does. From a New Event window, I can create the event, add users from the Exchange domain, verify their schedules, move the event, confirm it, have a mail sent that shows up to each person with the information and 3 buttons (Accept, Decline, and Accept Conditionally). After I send the Email, I can then track who has opened the Email, who has replied, who is coming, and who isn't.
Evolution is a nice client, but it's a client. All of that work is on the serverside.
Notes is OK, but I need a bigger machien to run it on than I run my data warehouses on. And when it crashes (when, not if), it's gonna be seriously borked.
This is why companies use Exchange/LookOut. Not because it's a great mail client, but because it integrates all of the possible messageing functions a business needs, and talks to additional software like Project to plot out Project Management information.
OpenMail is the only other server-side enterprise messaging system out there that fulfills these needs. It's a decent program, it's not MS, it's significantly cheaper (if for no other reason then you only need 10% of the servers to run it on), and it runs on a more stable OS.
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
It's "viruses," goddammit. Not "virii."
Wow, that's like, 116 mailboxes per server. Yeah, scales really well.
Well, yes, you're right.
A single Linux box with sendmail and imap would seem to be a lot more capable.
My workplace generally uses MS Exchange and they do indeed require more servers and tinier inboxes than I am accustomed to in a Unix environment. Probably the license fees are higher, too.
But, to be fair, I think the reason those Exchange servers only handle a fraction of the workload is that they are really being asked to do a lot more work behind the scenes: running SQL, running LDAP, managing calendars, deleting vbs attachments and replacing them with text messages before the Lookout clients get hold of them, providing GUIs to the admins, etc. I have to think a Unix server doing all those things would be burdened, too.
The users are generally quite happy using Exchange, except for the viri and for the limitations on their mailbox sizes and occasional mysteries about old backed-up email disappearing.
Interestingly, though, we have UNIX based sendmail servers ahead of the Exchange servers, which makes for a nice fast means of checking inbound mail. It costs nothing and gives a layer of protection and flexibility.
On my end as a user, I'll use fetchmail when my inbox is migrated from local and NFS mountable mbox files to whatever the format is on the Exchange server.
Exchange reliability has been pretty good since a few teething problems a month or two after it was installed. It's not quite where it should be: the Goner worm caused the Exchange admins to shutdown service for a few hours, which inconvenienced more than a few users. Otherwise, it's been humming for a couple of years.
Exchange is a good product. I would really hate to see it used as lever for lockin, but I fear it might.
FWIW, Domino was a very close contender in our evaluation process. I have no idea what its capabilities are these days, but you should probably take a look at it, too.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
USACE is contracting most of their IT work to a company called Syntegra. I think most of the WAN is now Syntegra. And they want to start moving the admins of the local sites to syntegra and away from US government employees. I heard the annual contract is something to the tune of $350 million.
Just because it's "Jet" based doesn't make it an Access database.
Yeah, I suppose that Access databases are Jet databases doesn't matter.
Perhaps some of the problems you had were because you tried to open it up in Access to look at the pretty tables?
Uh, yeah. NO.
With all the problems you list, isn't it possible you might have configured something incorrectly?
Always possible, but not in this case.
Crashing
Bug, documented by Microsoft; applied suggested Microsoft fix. Fix does not always work.
corrupted message stores
Bug, documented by Microsoft, when related to "bad message" problem. Storage of all mail in single file increases chance of damage to mail store due to disk corruption and other hardware problems, or uncleanly closing the database (i.e., when exchange crashes). If IMS hands off a message to STORE.EXE, then STORE crashes before it's in the database, mail disappears. I've seen it happen.
slow mail delivery
IMAP on exchange is just not fast. 500MHz server, 512MB RAM, SCSI disks, 16 users, not heavily loaded, exchange delivers mail to imap clients much more slowly than less capable hardware running IMAPd on unix.
open relay
Not exchange servers I've configured, but it's the default settings. Check your SPAM headers sometime.
1mb PPT attachment to all 1200 of your executives
I don't have 1200 executives. However, let's play your game. In the 300 remote-servers example, you would not be delivering the attachment once, by the way. You would be delivering it at least 300 times. So, not "just a smidge over 1MB"
Granted, the general idea of using a database to store mail is a nice one, for this specific reason -- multiple delivery of email.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Just like a square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square?
I believe the Jet engine is at the core of Access, but it's now known as MSDE, and is really a stripped version of MS-SQL Server.
And an Exchange server does a lot more than sendmail. I know all the hardcore unix geeks think that everything past pop3 and smtp connectivity is bloat, but real users love these features. And it makes management easier. Who wants to send 50 emails to schedule a meeting when you have shared calendars and the manager can send out a tasking?
The reason MS is so successful is because the geeks who run the company realize that the product has to have features needed by real users, not the sys admin who only sends out a few text messages a day.
Is write caching turned off on your SCSI adapter? I've seen a database corruption on Exchange, but it was easily fixed running isinteg utility.
it's clear you're only talking about Exchange 5.5.
Yes.
E2k has been out for well over a year and doesn't
The next version is always the one that works with MSFT stuff, isn't it?
The corruption of mail store you mentioned on improper shutdown is iffy at best
SCSI RAID system. No faults. No other files lost/corrupted/etc. System on UPS. No improper shutdowns of system that I know of.
Poof. Instant time and space savings, even if spread across 20-30 servers
Yes, this is the advantage of using a database to store messages. However, sendmail will not send a single message 30 separate times to 30 recipients at a remote sever; it sends it once. So the time savings are still there. On the remote system, the single messages gets exploded into X number of files, where X=number of local recipients. This is a downside of using separate files for each mailbox. So, no space savings.
I suppose it would be possible to have procmail strip attachments into files, and have an imapd re-assemble the messages when requested. Or, I could use Cyrus.
It has a unified message store, which is a blessing and a curse. Blessing for efficiency purposes, curse for recovery and migration purposes.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Can you give me a pointer to QMail's bulletin system? How does it interact with IMAP?
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Please refrain from speaking about things when you have no idea what you're talking about.
n 't-count people saying that all of this could be done with opensource products, it can't right now.
To all the uninformed and never-worked-in-corporate-it-and-no-helpdesk-does
Our company researched a migration from Exchange to a linux-based product and simply could not do it. Two key features available in exchange are NOT available in opensource tools: shared calendering and shared contacts. Sure you can hack something together with ldap to handle the shared contacts but the outlook client won't support it. Everything else I looked into from Bynari et. al. required alot of the work to be done from a web interface. Forget the shared calendaring. It didn't take advantage of the normal outlook mechanism and didn't work quite right. Don't give me any shit about using something other than outlook either. When your company runs Office, outlook is a part of it. Why go and shell out more money for another mail client? Besides, no other mail clients support shared calendaring. You may not need it at home but business damn sure love it and frankly so do I.
Maybe iCal will be finally standardized and integrated into outlook but until that time, companies that already use Office, will use outlook because it's included and thus will want to use the features of it.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
Well, honestly, I think HP and OpenMail was much like IBM and OS/2. They never really tried to make the product superior, because deep down, the majority of people working for them didn't really believe in it to start with.
We purchased Manage-X and Openview from HP about a year and a half ago, and a couple of HP reps came out to our site to train us on the products, take us out to dinner, etc. I brought up OpenMail at that time, because their latest release had just come out and I was playing with it on a Linux server. Their immediate reaction was "Ugh... OpenMail? That's a terrible product."
I tried to probe them for reasons why they disliked it, but I guess they realized they shouldn't talk so badly about one of their own software packages. They just made comments like "Well, I haven't actually used the very latest version, but in the past it just wasn't very user-friendly."
I think it is fair to mention Caldera's Volution Messaging Server, which is marketed as a Linux-based, low cost alternative to Exchange. What is interesting is that a large part of this product is actually open source: Postfix, Cyrus-IMAP, OpenLDAP, OpenSSL, HORDE/IMP. Caldera's contribution is arguably valuable: they tied the whole mess together, added a user-friendly interface (integration and user friendliness is something open source projects are often horrible at) and added Outlook-compatible calendaring. Still, what is notable is that the open source world is already a long way there. All it needs is packaging and calendaring. Make it work out of the box without the fuss, and you got an Exchange-killer.
If this is true, then OpenMail is doomed.
Quite frankly, no-one (save a few fanatics) is going to put forth lots of effort to convince a company to add enough functionality to a product so it becomes viable to purchase. It's Samsung's duty to add the things that are lacking, since they're picking up someone else's failing product.
I'm not going to recommend OpenMail to *any* colleges or businesses until they first prove that they have the programming ability to fix the problems in the current product, and add functionality (such as calendar/scheduling) that users have come to expect in Exchange Server.
Not the time savings I was talking about. I mean the time it takes to update 1200 separate mail-files with 1200 separate 1mb files. Exchange writes it to disk once (and fast into the database) for all 1200 users.
This can apparently be done with Qmail and plain old files as well.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
It's a great product; it's hugely scalable and unbelievably fast. It comes out with monthly to quarterly builds, has a free 50 user key for Linux until 2005. Keys and the RPMs are openly available via ftp.
- Guide-rev1-1.htm , and buried in this ftp (ftp.itrc.hp.com) somewhere are the tarred RPMs.
:)
The Linux version is well supported and comes as an RPM (that works). The message store is fast as hell; the web client is excellent and comes in a few flavors.
The sad thing about Slashdot and what keeps me from posting here is that this is old news. Samsung picked up OpenMail months ago. Why I don't bother to post - well, those of us who don't know the editors know why I don't post.
linuxkey@openmail.com is the email address to obtain Linux keys, there is a useful but slightly dated FAQ about installing HPOM here, http://www.hpc-consulting.com/OM-QS-Configuration
The licensing is kind of freakish and annoying, Exchange administrators enjoy being able to steal seats, but they also enjoy a broken product. I have investigated Exchange 2000, we flat out denied the product as unscalable and useless, and are very glad we used OpenMail.
Death to Carly Fiorina - the crappy CEO of HP (and the organizer of the Lucent spin off from AT&T a COMPLETE failure). She is a bane to HP. She tried to kill OpenMail, fricking SAMSUNG picked it up. Death to Carly. Walter B. Hewlett, David Woodley Packard, Susan Packard Orr and the Previous CEO of HP, Lewis E Platt, ALL HATE YOU CARLY. YOU ARE WRONG AND THE PACKARD FAMILY IS RIGHT. The merger with Compaq is a bastardization. She actually destroyed the HP RPN calculator division because it wasn't growing fast enough! The division makes money - but doesn't grow fast enough. She has no 30 year vision, she is a horrible CEO, and while Steve Jobs of Apple takes a $1 a year salary (and that's what he deserves for not porting OS X to x86), she took 3 Million on bonus this year even though the STOCK TANKED.
I love OpenMail; I love RPN calculators, and long live the real HP (and Agilent). Death to Carly. (Hey, Carly, I dumped my HP stock when I saw you messing around, and I saved myself a lot of money by doing so.)
PS - HewPaq will fail. They *think* they will compete with IBM, hah. Ha. ha. IBM still makes new technology, not fires whole divisions of engineers. And Carly, learn from your FAILED Price Waterhouse endeavor. You suck as a CEO. You are a bad person.
Long live OpenMail!
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
there are lots of Unix-based competitors to Microsoft Exchange. What about sendmail? There are not a lot of Exchange clones with code licensed from Microsoft in them that will behave exactly the same for Outlook clients. Even then there is now Evolution from Ximian. Volution from Caldera, Insight from Bynari, and various web based solutions.
How about an alphabet soup of open standards that does the job better, easier, more efficiently: POP, IMAP, SMTP, HTTP, SSL, CGI, FTP, LDAP, ABCDEFG, ETC?
Its not called competition if you're selling the same product.
But, to be fair, I think the reason those Exchange servers only handle a fraction of the workload is that they are really being asked to do a lot more work behind the scenes
True that Exchange versus Sendmail is radically unfair. But if you want Apples To Apples, Exchange is significantly less scalable than Lotus Notes or Novell Groupwise. Significantly Less users per server, less mail moved per hour, etc etc.
Now, I'm not saying that scalability concerns outweigh the pretty client. They probably don't.
But, Fact: Exchange is just not built for speed -- Look at the architecture diagram! There's about 2000 little boxes on there as old early 90s X.400 system was adapted for modern usage. It's an overly complex bloatpile that works only because MS has massive resources to make it work.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
...OpenMail is the *only* e-mail platform out there, besides Exchange that will support a whole slew of Microsoft Outlook features.
That is not true (any more). The Calendar product in OpenMail is a version of the Steltor CorporateTime calendar. The Steltor Calendar has an Outlook 'service provider' that allows Outlook to talk to their calendar server. Combine that with SMTP/IMAP4/LDAP, and you've got a close competitor to Exchange..
Take a look at Bynari's Insight product... for another 'possbility'.. Calendar-server less calender service!
Oh, one thing about OpenMail.. it IS standards based, as long as you don't mind running an X.400 mail system with an SMTP gateway...
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
Did I say I worked in U of Kansas? I've personally seen and managed Exchange servers with an uptime of months without reboots. So anytime I hear that someone's server keeps crashing it means bad hardware, bad admins or politics is influencing proper administration of the servers. For example management says no mailbox limits and the server crashes because it runs out of disk space.
So what are you using?
Um... an IMAP server and calendar.yahoo.com.
The truth is, we have no central scheduling app. We have a bunch of admins with those big spiral-bound calendar books like they use at doctor's offices to write your appointment down in, and then the little card, which you lose, like, immediately, like it doesn't even make it into your pocket somehow, and you miss your appointment and then you get the statement from your HMO that says they paid for the visit anyway, and you wonder if you've just accidentally committed insurance fraud.
there are lots of Unix-based competitors to Microsoft Exchange.
What about sendmail?
Bad example. Sendmail is one of the most non Unix pieces of software ever, in terms of modular and secure design. More to the point, its at best clone on the Exchange Internet Mail Connector. An MTA != A groupware app.
There are not a lot of Exchange clones with code licensed from Microsoft in them that will behave exactly the same for Outlook clients.
Not, but there are clones which will behave exactly (as in, equivalent functionality and no staff retraining) the same for Outlook clients.
Evolution from Ximian.
Yes indeed. Exchange connectors for Exchange5.5 and 2000 will be avaliable at the start of next year. They do all the X400 based stuff Outlook and Exchange do, including group calendaring, unsending messages, etc.
Volution from Caldera
I thought this was a system management tool and a repackaging of postfix, an imap server, and a couple of other bits and pieces. Again, an MTA and MDA are not groupware. Though it it has OpenLDAP and more importantly some way of doing the calendaring stuff it would be close. Corect me if this is the case.
Insight from Bynari
Indeed. Insight also does all the Exhcange - > Outlook specific stuff. The client is also free as in beer, so download it and give it a try. it does seem a little clunky tho, especially when compared to evolution.
Steltor
You didn't mention Steltor that seems to be the best of the Exchange comaptible groupware servers. I have yet to implement it myself but from what I understand its much better maintained and works better with existing Unix services than the others.
35,000 users / 300 servers => 117 users per server. I could do that with PostFix and 300 matchbox '386es! IBM have TWO MILLION USERS on ONE zSeries box, no sweat, for much less than the software cost alone of running two million Exchange clients. Now that is `scales well'!
Damn Microsoft and their abuse of terminology! An `embedded' system should not require 64 or 128MB of RAM and gigabytes of disk!PS: visit Bynari for another Exchange alternative, including alternative clients.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
What can I say? ``Bynari?'' Visit http://www.bynari.com/ (no commercial connection).
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Which is uniquie because it's stunningly responsive for Microsoft.
Consider IE's recent broken-MIME-handling vulnerability, in which you could get an EXE file silently run by shipping it from your webserver with a mime type like audio/x-midi; it's been in IE for at least six years and it took Microsoft three months from the initial public outcry to the fix.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
MS took a more active role in the development after that, however. By 1991, MS and Sybase were both working on the engine and core features of SQL Server. MS then produced it's own version of SQL Server for NT in 93. This was a major rewrite, though feature-compatible with earlier Sybase/MS versions. In 94, MS and Sybase parted ways, and traded code.
95 saw MS-SQL Server 6.0, the 1st solely produced MS SQL Server (though, of course, Sybase's code was still in there). However, SQL Server 7.0's engine was almost totally rewritten by MS, and the current SQL Server 2000 is based on that engine. A quick history, with MS spin of course, can be found at MSDN. I know it's MS's PR, but the major events coincide with the known history of the product. Just ignore the marketing hyperbole.