Exchange 2003 vs. Sendmail Mail Routing?

good soldier svejk asks: "I am a unix sysadmin at a medium sized (~10,000 user) organization. We currently using Exchange 5.5 for messaging, calendaring etc., and sendmail for mail routing and relaying. We arrived at this architecture because Exchange 5.5 was neither flexible enough to route our mail nor secure enough to meet our relay control standards (my Windows counterparts tell me it has since improved it's relay control). Now we are looking to upgrade to Exchange 2003 and the boss wants to know if we can eliminate the sendmail layer. We use LDAP mail routing across multiple domains and Brightmail Anti-Spam. We have not yet implemented Active Directory. Does Exchange 2003 offer a sendmail comparable level of configurability and flexability regarding routing, access control, filtering, virtual hosting and queue management? Just as important, is the Windows 2000/Exchange 2003-SMTP combination adequately securable for use in the DMZ?"

Comments

Re:There are others

[clifyt]

Because Exchange is MUCH more than an email solution.

If you don't know this, you honestly shouldn't be making suggestions.

Microsoft *IS* insecure, but find a decent mail solution, that has scheduling and can also deal with groupware aspects such as Project in a single package...I'm not talking about individual packages...I'm talking ONE package that works seamlessly.

There are a lot of reason bosses ask for Exchange. The mail component is a small portion of this. With the new exchange server coming out later this year, it will be even better. I wish the Open Source community would get something better than this, but it hasn't happened yet -- even the individual packages as weak compared to what M$ can do.

And I say this as a certified M$ hater. I use their products at work, but I'm a Mac / Linux user at home (except when I pull up XP so I can play my video games).

Re:I wouldnt recommend Exchange for you

[jhoffoss]

Re-read the post. He's already using Exchange, he's only using Sendmail for routing. With his next upgrade, he wants to eliminate Sendmail and use Exchange for the routing, AS WELL AS the calendar/groupware/project/etc functionality already in Exchange.