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HP's OpenMail to support Linux
HP has announced that it will support Linux with its OpenMail which provides a UNIX based messaging/scheduling package (similar to MS Outlook). According to HP it will also provide Outlook connectivity, which gives it a unique edge. There is a free beta available, and the release is set for September.
From reading the product info. It looks like this
is mail server software, so it is more like exchange and sendmail than outlook. I think.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
From their description page:
Once you have agreed to the conditions of the program you will then be able to download the OpenMail server installation image for RedHat Linux 6.0, the OpenMail MAPI Service Provider for the Microsoft Outlook client, and the OpenMail Motif Client for Linux (OMGUI).
By releasing binaries built against and ackaged for RH6 they seem to be implying that they aren't really supporting Linux as they are Red Hat.
The product blows. I used to coadminister two OpenMail installs on Solaris (SUN 4000's w/ 3 GB of memory and 96 GB of triple mirrored disk space). The product is poor, the architecture is worse, and support on non-HP machines is laughable. We usually had to spell Solaris for the phone techs we got, they had one semi-knowledgable person in the U.S. and the port had been subcontracted. You'd give them an error number from their product and they would have no idea where it came from. It's built as a monolithic system based on x400 of all things. It took beefy boxes to even run it for a measely 1600 users per server. All the data is stored in a proprietary database. It was only a few months ago that they changed the architecture so that it didn't have do a pair of chowns for every operation on a mail message. They use file names based of a base-32 encoding of 0-v. I spent a week mucking about in their propreity, binary, personal distribution list storage and I think I'm still psycically (sp?) scared. Heck, they even used to leak file handles. Who ever heard of leaking file handles?!?!
- coug
Does anyone know if this thing works with the palm pilot? I was under the impression that the palm and outlook worked together, so if this HP thing is outlook compatible, will it be palm compatible?
For about 30 seconds, I thought about using this.
Then I remembered the truth: Outlooks sucks.
It's buggy, full of badly written and non-standards based code. 90% of the trouble with email I get calls from users on is Outlook's fault.
I want standards based stuff, NOT to throw HP's linux based crap on top of Microsoft's Win95 based crap.
I'll wait for the open source community to write a 'better than outlook' program, using standard, like POP3, IMAP, vcal, etc... the only reason it hasn't happened is that people keep trying to make Outlook work.
Help achieve Liberty in your lifetime - join the Free State Project - http://www.freestateproject.org
Geezz If HP can pull this off and this is not vaporware Microsoft best watch it's butt. Exchange is a literal stronghold in the Corporate environment. Granted there is CC:Mail and a few others. But Exchange rules. With the architecture designed as it is, third party tools for information management on the OpenMail platform will be a real boon for developers. I know I have written a few solutions for Exchange and it is a very complex system. The whole M$ implementation of mapi is scary. If I read the spec right OpenMail would leverage LDAP. This could open great doors in development arena. My big question is, will corporate America pay two sets of admins to watch over the different os'es that supply the mission critical data to the network?
Ho ho ho....
r ld (CC:Mail recently lost this title to Lotus Notes), and breaks it (major areas of functionality such as rules just plain don't work).
Last I saw HP OpenMail is CC:Mail hacked so the server can run on a Unix machine rather than an NT machine.
It's takes the Mail-Client-Formerly-Known-As-The-Worst-In-The-Wo
Similar to Outlook ?? Well, about as similar as CC:Mail is to Outlook...
Outlook connectivity ?? Yeah, Outlook will read mail via VAPI or whatever it's called now, but then it also talks SMTP and POP3...
This is a bit of a non-story....
I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. - George Best
They say RH 6.0 because it's one point on an almost infinite line. It's much easier for marketing droids than saying Linux with x.x.x kernel x.x.x libc x.x.x X and so on.
Download it, check the tar -- there's no install script, it's very straightforward. Install it, then run ldd, see if it works.
Please stop this RH bashing FUD. Use your brain. Download it, check it out, THEN complain if you still think it's hoaky. Otherwise you sound like a lazy ass wanna be geek.
--
Infuriate left and right
hi,
i'd like to try this. i haven't had a chance to play with it and if it works, hey, cool. if not, no big deal... i have some users who could use the proised features.
i am having difficulty in getting the OMAIL package from the server. the machine keeps telling me forbidden. i can get the other pieces, even in the server directory, i just can't get the OMAIL piece. anyone have any luck?
jose
jose nazario jose@biocserver.cwru.edu
I haven't been able to figure this out from the docs on the web page (the fact that it's running at around 500k/sec for me is a factor). Can I, using the OpenMail client on Linux, connect to an Exchange server running on NT?
Thanks,
Dave Rudder
Citizens Against Plate Tectonics
I can't believe that. Not with my experience with Outlook/MSEXCH.
OpenMail may be fine if the corporate powers that be demand that you use X.400 crud.
My experience at my former empolyer (Alcatel - Richardson, USA) was that the OpenMail server was constantly being rebooted and down for a day or more at a time. Those rebels in R&D had Sun workstations running sendmail on their desktop. Not once in several years do I remember email for the R&D people being down.
It was great fun to laugh at those outside of R&D that had to depend on OpenMail.
Of course Outlook supports POP3, but that's just for getting mail. You couldn't store your mail in addition to your calendar, todo list, etc. on the server. Using IMAP instead will at least give you the ability to store your mail on the server, but Microsoft has chosen not to support storing anothing other than mail on an IMAP mail store. OpenMail gives all these abilities back to you.
It isn't designed for the individual who justs wants mail, and shouldn't be read as such. Its for the corporation who wants to do scheduling and the such off their e-mail system, and don't want to use NT to do it.
I can't speak for whether or not the product itself works well, or if it crashes all the time as people have claimed, but I do know that the arguments being placed against it as far as Oulook connectivity and its pointlessness are far from on target.
Personally I think this is a great idea. Of course I know nothing about OpenMail itself, but do think Linux desperatly needs an integrated messaging/calendaring solution like the one exchange/outlook provide. It's a big draw back for Linux, since after all E-Mail is one of the bigger (the biggest ?) element of an IT infrastructure. SMTP/POP3 and so on do work, but don't have some of the features the corporate world likes to see, like fully integrated global address books (That you use with calendaring as well), the ability to retract an e-mail message, and so on. They also require a LOT of storage space (Unlike say Groupwise, which only keeps one copy of anything, so when you send an attachment to 10 users on the same postoffice, only one copy of the attachment is kept.). Then there's Calendaring, Tasking, To-Do lists, etc ...
IMAP is part of the solution, but not good enough.
Hey, maybe I'm just not aware of it, but there really should be an Open Source project working on a competitive product to exchange/outlook.
As for OpenMail, I'm definitely going to give it a chance and take a look at it.
J.F.
Has anyone else received Authentication Errors even though they filled in the form and received an "official" userid and password? HP would probably be more impressive if they made sure their servers worked before announcing a new beta... (or do I just expect too much?)
Your client is not allowed to access the requested object.
Hey, what is this? They let people get through the registration screen, assign a username and password, and then deny access to the file! Oh well, at least I can get my money back. :)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
OpenMail has nothing to do with ccMail except that
ccMail is a "supported" client of OpenMail. As
are various other mail clients, including now
Outlook.
OpenMail is a big wrapper around Sendmail to
provide features like an address directory and
(allegedly) easier maintenance, etc. It supports
LDAP and MAPI now too, which is good.
Of course Outlook supports POP3, but that's just for getting mail. You couldn't store your mail in addition to your calendar, todo list, etc. on the server. Using IMAP instead will at least give you the ability to store your mail on the server, but Microsoft has chosen not to support storing anothing other than mail on an IMAP mail store. OpenMail gives all these abilities back to you.
/.ers and other people if they dared to go against the IMAP standard and store non-mail items on the server in some proprietary format.
Can you name another client that lets you store something other than mail on an IMAP store? The M stands for Message, which most people take to mean Mail. I bet microsoft would receive holy hell from
HP provides a MAPI transport that allows Outlook to use its Openmail server to do a lot of groupware functionality, which is really cool.
Microsoft ships outlook with other such transports - one for ccMail, one for MS Mail. Compuserve wrote one to access Compuserve mail. Transend writes one that has more features for ccMail connectivity than the one Outlook has. There was even an ill-fated one written by AOL to access AOL mail, but that never got out of beta (AOL nixed it, not Microsoft)
It's up to the person or company who writes the MAPI transport to enable the functionality they want - whether it be server side calendars or just mail, it's up to them. Outlook makes it easy to write something that just downloads items to the local machine. To write a store provider as well as a transport provider (which is what it appears that HP has done) is more difficult but not undoable.
It isn't designed for the individual who justs wants mail, and shouldn't be read as such. Its for the corporation who wants to do scheduling and the such off their e-mail system, and don't want to use NT to do it.
There are a lot of reasons to use Openmail other than not wanting to use NT. HP used to have a version of Openmail for NT, actually, although they stopped producing new versions for it.
I can't speak for whether or not the product itself works well, or if it crashes all the time as people have claimed, but I do know that the arguments being placed against it as far as Oulook connectivity and its pointlessness are far from on target.
Well I think they're on target in that outlook is a common product and it's great if HP can leverage that (Along with them now supporting linux as a server platform) to get more companies to decide to use their server yet use a client that users might be more comfortable/familiar with.
I just got the client and am testing it out now. All the basic functionality (compared to the NT/CC:mail client) seems to be there. The GUI is kind of unresponsive but that seems typical of Motif apps that I've used in the past. But at least I'm one step closer to not having to ever log into my NT box. Rockin'!
OpenMail has both client and server offerings. The strategy from
a client perspective is to support an open "client of choice" paradigm.
Clients such as MS Outlook, Outlook express, MS mail, cc:Mail, LAN/Mobile,
Eudora and Netscape go against the same message store in Native mode.
"Native" means NO GATEWAYS, and no UGLY translations. So yes... OM
supports the MS Outlook client just like (or better) than NT Exchange.
The interesting thing is HP's plan to opensource their native Unix client
called OMGUI. The client has been ported to Linux and is available form
their web site. Given that HP has done the work to make the MS Outlook
client work against the Linux OM server, one can see how it would be
possible to take the opensource client (OMGUI) and quite quickly duplicate
and exceed the capabilities of MS Outlook. After all... the Linux based data store
already contains the data which is presented to the Outlook client.
On the server side OpenMail supports both the ITU and ITEF's internet protocol
suite. OpenMail is a superset of Internet and X.400/X.500. It can synchronize with
other LDAP directories,X.500 and even Domino/Notes DB's. It also supports SSL secure
access from the internet via their integration with HP's Virtual Vault offering. This is
great for mobile users and PDA users that simply want to "safely" read their mail by
entering a URL from any browser. This stuff could be big!
I use HP OpenMail everyday. Basically they provide a MAPI DLL that connects to the OpenMail server behind the scenes.
Yes, it is waay better the old CCMail/Openmail crap that others have mentioned. You get full Outlook functionality Calendering/Scheduling etc.
Plus the backend runs on something other than NT. The HP website mentions that on a kick butt HPUX server you could host 20k email accounts. Id like to see exchange handle more than 2k on a box.
Heck, Ive heard rumors of a large company deploying 100 exchange servers just to support about 50k accounts. What an administrative nightmare!!!!
--John C
Just press reload a couple of time on your browser... You'll get it! -=CaP=- Once there was windows 3.1 we we're one foot from the cliff. Windows 95, was a BIG step forward (!)
I don't understand this obsession with words like "client", "server", and "client-server", which yes, is in fact used as a noun, as in, "Can I get a client-server for this?" I have no idea what they mean.
As far as I can tell, these are low-tech words created by people who either didn't know what they were talking about, or else had to re-invent new words for old things to deceive the public into buying something. It's just like "intranet" and "enterprise". Blech.
Are uucp and uux clients or servers? How about uucico? What about tip or cu? What about getty? Is a proxy daemon a client or a server? These words, like most from marketing, have no real technical meaning. And don't be telling me that everything that provides services is a server. My shell is not a server. The kernel is not a server.
There are even murkier examples than these.
That's a good question. What are there, fifty-five versions of Linux now? There are so many variations in kernels and libraries and installations and adminning and util sets, that it's very easy to get lost. Diversity is good. Lying is bad. Monopolies are bad.
It's good that we have these choices, but it's hard to pretend these are all the same operating system. They're not. The operating systems is the kernel, the drivers, the libraries, the standard utilities, the standard devel tools, the GUIs and shells, and especially the admin setup.
When you vary these, you get a different operating system.
Apart from that, I think IMAP sucks. It's an overly complex standard, with loads of features that regular users don't need.
What I'd love to see was a small extension to POP3 (a POP4 :-), that contains the bare minimum to send messages (XTND XMIT provide this today), so a client could talk only to the POP server, and to manage folders (add, remove, rename, move messages between folders, switch between folders), listing header summaries (like XOVER on NNTP servers) and apart from that only standard POP3 features.
It would be a lot easier on servers than IMAP, a lot simpler to implement, and would cover the needs of 90% of all users.
*BUT*, it would make the use of server side folders a damn lot more widespread.
where are the screenshots goddammit??
A previous workplace had a powerful HP box chugging and chugging away on openmail and the thing was always overworked. About 3000 moderate-to-low use mail users, something like 96 GB of disks, and mail still took about 15-30 minutes to deliver.
What really made it worse is that this place was using it as a POP server. No OpenMail clients (which were horrendous anyway) being used and POP was only semi-supported on OpenMail (this is in early 98). And you had to use HP sendmail, which was always about six to a dozen revisions behind the one everyone else was using.
One poster suggests that there are people using HP OpenMail for good uses. (Not HP, I bet!) I'll be impressed to find out what, but if you ask me, you can see OpenMail one of two ways: it's either a second- or third-rate Lotus Notes, or an incredibly wasteful MTA.
Regards,
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
I haven't tried it yet (downloading now) but this does look pretty promising. Unfortunately its about 12 months too late for us and the decision has already been made to migrate most of our process engineers to NT. Why you may ask? Its simple, Outlook and Office. If the Sun PCI cards and this were around 6 months ago i may have been able to win the fight, but alas.
Oh well, this is why i changed jobs from sysadmin to application programming, one job shrinks while the seems to grow boundlessly...
So it's bound to be ugly and clumsy :)
They're pretty smart not to include screenshots.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Originally, Microsoft billed client-side MAPI as a "Universal Inbox" and as an OS feature -"Windows Messaging". By the time Exchange v1 (v4) was out the door, people figured that they meant no such thing, and MAPI/Outlook is pretty well tied to Exchange server for many of it's features.
So when ever someone advertises that you can use Outlook to get at their mail store, it begs the question how much of Outlook's functionality actually works. (For example, you can sorta get Notes mail from Outlook, but that's about it.)
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
NOTE: Right click and select Save Link As... to download OenMail server software. Make sure the file type selected in the Save as type field is All Files (*.*). Left click to download OpenMail client software.
First, this is wrong -- they imply that clicking by different mouse buttons will cause their script to download different things, what is rather strange thing in itself. But second, recommendation to use "file type All files (*.*)" is nothing short of insulting -- especially for a file that in no possible way can be used on a box where "file type" and "*.*" both exist and are somehow related.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
yes. at the # sign type rm -r -f /*
then press enter.
that will put all the warez on the planet on your hard drive.
I have found a lengthy discussion about their license requirements. So do I need to buy one? How much does it cost. - Any links?
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
We run Novell Groupwise, and it stores everything, including calendar information, in the same message store, all of which is accessible via IMAP. Schedule items are nothing but e-mail messages with a second set of RFC822-like header lines at the beginning of the body text, so if you read your mail via a non-Groupwise IMAP client, you just see "Time:" "Location:" etc. headers at the top of your message.
There's no reason in the world why this would break anything, and it's open and accessible to anyone who wants to mess with it (eg: I've written Perl scripts to check my own calendar and page me via qpage if I have a meeting coming up that meets certain criteria for being important).
If I were a wide-eyed innocent, I would say something like "Gee, I don't understand why everyone doesn't do this."
-Graham
I don't intend to buy anything else from HP until I get Linux drivers for my HP OfficeJet 1150C. If they weren't sitting so tight on the code, these drivers would already be available.
(I want the scanner even more than the printer!)
{!-- I've sent in requests to HP, but their public announcements have denied that there is any demand. Pity. It worked well under windows --}
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Oh, give the kid a little credit. He was actually able to install the operating system and get it to start, thus proving that Red Hat's install procedure truly is idiot-proof.
For more information, click here.
This is amusing. The same setup is used here (OpenMail MAPI on the enterprise; sendmail for the entire Unix side I admin), and this is the norm. OpenMail goes down randomly while my single sendmail hub keeps accept()'ing away *tail wag*
Of course, I must occasionally check in with OpenMail because the win* folks generally don't know better. All I have to say is "Vive VMware!" It let me get rid of the dual-boot and shoehorn NT and all its crud into a 1.6GB partition.
I should note that Unix in general exhibits weird problems under certain conditions. Just try typo'ing the lockd line in /etc/services one day... if you have NFS, all hell will break loose. If you use NFS'd mailspools, oops. >:o)
--
--
Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken.
That doesn't mesh with my experience.
We have thousands of users on our big servers, and they don't go down hardly at all. A buddy of mine uses Exchange at his company, and they are drowning.
Perhaps your IT guys need to get a life?
my personal feelingsa on OpenMail :
- if you are looking for a normal POP/IMAP server
capability, and nothing else, there are other
offerrings in the market, that may be better for
this purpose.
- if you are in an environment, where you have a
diverse client setup, then OpenMail offers value.
- if you are looking for "low admins/users"
ratio, then OpenMail offers value. (I have heard
of companies with 40K users & 5 admins)
- if you are looking for an intel based Un*x
messaging offering, then OpenMail offers value.
regards.
We'll be having a Birds of a Feather table at the LinuxWorld confence next week.
Wednesday, August 11 at 5:30. Come talk to us about OpenMail...