63 thoughts on - Which Is Better? Microsoft Exchange 2016 Or Linux-based SMTP Servers?

• I think you’re a bit confused about what an SMTP server is. Exchange typically provides several services, one of which is SMTP. Comparing features of Exchange to similar products in the open source world is going to be difficult, because Microsoft has a vendor lock-in that makes it difficult to exactly duplicate every feature.

  On Linux, an SMTP server can deliver locally to a file (such as
  /var/spool/mail/username) and you can read that file with several MUAs, but it sounds to me like you’re asking if there is a way to have multiple folders. That’s more like something provided by an IMAP
  server. Typically mail arrives in your mailbox via SMTP, and is then delivered into a mailbox that is read by a completely separate service that provides the IMAP protocol (or POP3, but I hope not). IMAP
  servers can provide you with many different ‘folders’ and not just an INBOX.

  There are several IMAP servers for CentOS, for ease of setup I suggest dovecot. If you need a webmail client for your mail service, I
  suggest RoundCube (package name: roundcubemail). I prefer postfix for SMTP although there’s also sendmail and exim.

• If you find setting up a linux based SMTP server “extremely difficult”, then you have probably answered your own question already. Stick to what you know.

  hth

• You would need to use other pieces besides just the SMTP aspect if using Linux. (ie, you would need an IMAP server, a Web front end (like Roundcube).

  The main issue is still going to be calendaring. To be perfectly honest and frank here .. NONE of the Linux based calendaring solutions are good enough (IMHO) for major business use.

  As much as it pains me to say it, I would personally recommend either office365 or googleapps for mail if I were currently a SysAdmin making recommendations for a company of moderate size. If you HAVE to run a local server, then again, as much as it pains me to say it .. I would use Exchange because of the terrible calendaring on Linux based solutions.

  There are some suites out there that run on Linux and provide some decent calendaring (zimba, iredmail, kolab, etc.) But my personal experience managing those (and using them) is that they are subpar to the google calendar or exchange calendar solutions.

  That said, there are a bunch of other pieces (like SPAM filtering, virus scanning, etc.) and all of that adds to the cost of an Exchange solution. And you really can’t just ignore those things in 2018 anymore
  .. so certainly a Linux based on premise solution would be cheaper to maintain.

  People say that office365 and googleapps solutions are too expensive, but my experience tells me that if you factor in all costs (including hardware and sysadmin time, etc.), and look at quality of service
  (especially calendaring), those services are competitive.

• These are extremely subjective statements. For me, I would not be able to set up Microsoft servers in less than 10 or maybe even 100 times the time it costs me to set up similar Linux servers.

  To refer to an old joke, that is in fact very true: “UNIX/Linux is very user-friendly, it’s just very selective about who its friends are” :-).

• hi there

  I would categorize  Exchange 2016 as “groupware” rather than SMTP server per say, because you sent lots of stuff out of Exchange.

  so to compare Exchange with postfix, exim would not be a proper comparison. For Linux based groupware that i know is completely free is Kolab (https://www.kolab.org/). its fairly easy to setup. Not sure about Zimbra is its Still free as of now.

  If you are to use  postfix, exim or sendmail you would need to setup a webmail for that and use something like SquirrelMail or Dovecot of which  that more a bit complex than just setting up Kolab.

  So in Short if you ware looking for Exchange equivalent in linux try Kolab or Zimbra. don’t look at postfix or exim.

• Dear Promise Kumalo,

  Thank you for the recommendations.

  So for Exchange equivalents in the Linux world, it is Zimbra and Kolab.

• Sorry for top posting…

  Before making any decisions, I would absolutely look at Zimbra.

  https://www.zimbra.com/

• Dear Jonathan Billings,

  Admittedly, I am a bit confused.

  Thank you for enlightening me with more in-depth information.

• Kopano is available in a free and a paid version and does everything Exchange does and more (and better):

  https://kopano.com/ (paid version)
  https://kopano.io/ (community version, testbed)

• Turritopsis Dohrnii Teo En Ming wrote:

  Based on experience at a number of jobs, Exchange may appear to be easy to configure, but as soon as you get past the utterly basic configuration, when management or other departments want more, it then becomes a major headache.

  I work for a US federal contractor these days, on site (civilian sector)
  and they just gave up, and moved to M$ cloud for it. And most people HATE
  IT.

  Searching, if you’re not using Outlook, is either terrrible or nonexistant
  (they’ve started auto-archiving here, and I’m hearing there is no search).

  In addition, if you go to 365, you are NOT BUYING the software, you’re renting the service. You will be paying every year, and a service contract will cost, and, presumably, cost more every year.

  Linux, once you get over the learning curve, is not that difficult to administer. and there’s a lot of online help (just don’t expect us to do your job for you, as a few folks who’ve posted here over the years seeem to expect). You can also get contract help. If that’s important, you might consider upstream, who do provide paid support.

  And it will cost a lot less than M$.

  I don’t know of any mail system that you cannot do that in. Every one allows that.
  
  Yup. And fixes come a *LOT* faster, often in hours or days, as opposed to M$’s “there’s no probem, it’s your fault (insert one week to three months), ok, ok, we’ve got a fix

  Back in the last century, the old mainframe line was “nobody ever lost their job by recommending IBM”; since the nineties, it’s been
  “recommending Windows”, because that’s all they know. We won’t say how much M$ pays, both for advertising, FUD, and illegal under the table payments to manufacturers. Yup.

  mark

• Still a lot better than trying to run your own hodge-podge of nightmares on Linux.

• In my observation it stems from the practices of hiring IT
  professionals. Department or company personnel manager who has no IT
  knowledge (and shouldn’t!) has to hire IT manager. Here is where certifications came into play (and MS Certifications are plentiful around…), so the top guy in the IT position is most likely MS-trained guy. And that defines the field of knowledge of the whole IT team eventually.

  Incidentally, I contradicted myself above, did anybody notice? I told about IT manager “trained”, and training is different from knowledge, simply speaking you just know which buttons to push. But between people who possess knowledge (therefore can look deeper even when following manual doesn’t work) I know almost no one who has even single certificate…

  Valeri

• Andrew Holway wrote:

  Beg pardon? Did I make a mistake on the email address? I thought this went to the CentOS general discussion list.

  mark

• I specifically meant setting up and running email services on linux is not for the feint of heart and delivers little real value considering the plethora of free and commercial email services available.

• Well, I believe, the long and very polite Johnny’s post suggesting OP to buy MS service was fundamentally correct. If the person possesses no UNIX/Linux knowledge, and not willing dive into learning that, yet has great urge to have/run server… well, MS is probably the most right place to direct such person to. Whatever one is not willing to pay for by one’s time and effort, one will pay with money. You and I consider this list as last resort when we get stuck with technical problem, but some people consider it a first stop. And right answers depend on who is asking general advise in which direction to go, so I would recommend to OP (but not to UNIX/Linux person…) the same what Johnny had recommended.

  And I am the same shocked as you are by someone saying about his Linux nightmares. When said on this list that is.

  Valeri

• I would disagree.

  Postfix and Dovecot are both very well documented.

  Running the server yourself protects your users from content scanning by the companies that profit from tracking users.

  And running itself lets you run DANE for SMTP which makes MITM a lot more difficult when the other server you are talking to supports DANE
  for SMTP.

  The major e-mail services do not offer that.

  Sure it is more work, but it isn’t that difficult to get it right.

• Andrew, you should understand that you are talking to experts in Linux here. And even I (and I’m not considering myself an expert in Linux)
  have no trouble to set up mail server on Linux (with all blows and whistles like spam/virus filtering, etc).

  So, Mark meant to say your posts are offensive to Experts on this list.

  Please, take a note of it.

  With respect,

  Valeri

• Andrew Holway wrote:

  So, you’d say a company should use outside email? I would very strongly suggest that’s a BAD idea. For example, when M$ sucked all our local Exchange accounts to their cloud, I understand (I’m not in that group)
  that this was a one-way deal. From a friend, who’s a consultant, he was dealing with a client who’d let M$ do that when they went to Win10, and trying to get the email down for backups, etc, was a nightmare.

  mark

• No, i was talking to the OP who is seemingly not an expert. Advising those who not competent that they can set up and run their own mailserver is probably negligent.

  Whipping up Exim and Dovecot for your own private email server is one thing. Setting up for an organisation is a completely different story. Mailservers are extremely hard to do well and a job for a specialists. Just making mail deliverable requires specialist knowledge and keeping an up-to-date and effective spam filter is near impossible nowadays.

• It depends if the company has a sufficient size to support a production, mission critical email service. How many engineers to you need to ensure a proper support rotation? I work mainly in the SME space and haven’t seen self hosted email in over 5 years.

  I will admit that the screech of the cloud brigade is often loud and incoherent but you have to choose your battles. Email is a bitch. It seems, from a techie point of view, the problem with Microsoft is that they are forcing an all or nothing approach. If you take Office365 then you must take the Azure Exchange also which means the core infra guys are pretty much left high and dry, reduced to helping people install adobe acrobat on the new Windows10.

  I empathise. I’ve worked as an infrastructure admin and “Devops” engineer for over 10 years and now my role has been automated away by Kubernetes. Change is hard.

• So, I don’t think anyone can call me a ‘non linux’ guy :)

  But are you guys really telling you think the calendaring / scheduling for individual users and the main corporate account, etc. .. are working well enough with any Linux solution.

  I have researched this very recently and I have not found a solution that works even reasonably well.

  Red Hat has even shifted their calendars to Google .. does anyone think if an enterprise calendar that really worked was out there they would not be using it?

• I must confess, my servers are FreeBSD, but I’m quite sure the same is doable easily on Linux.

  We use for calendars Owncloud (may migrate to nextcloud in some future to come). That authenticates against LDAP.

  For mail we use postfix, dovecot and maia for spam filtering (the last harnesses spamassassin, clamav and few other things).

  Of course, zimbra you mentioned earlier in the thread (or was it not you?), and Kolab provide more corporate-like collaboration environments, but I shied away from them as I set myself a goal to give users individual handle on spam/virus filtering in email, and neither of them has per-user spam preferences (take it with the grain of salt, I might have missed something…)

  Just my $0.02.

  Valeri

• Andrew Holway wrote:

  Excerpt, what you seem to be missing, is that the OP posted *here*, and it seems, at least to me, that he’s looking at Linux as a distinct possibility.

  mark

• Hi!

  Am 18.07.2018 um 20:27 schrieb Johnny Hughes:
  […]
  […]

  Yes, I do think so! :-)

  At least for up to about 100 users (that’s the size of the businesses we usually have as our customers)

  We implemented Linux-based groupware solutions for those clients in the past
  (and hopefully will do in the future) based on the following main components:

  *) Linux (CentOS, SLES, OpenSUSE, depending on customers preferences)

  *) Cyrus IMAP

  *) Sendmail [sic]

  *) openLDAP

  *) SOGO (nobody mentioned SOGO yet, but IMHO it works very well and integrates perfectly into the Linux software stack!)

  *) Fusiondirectory (was GOSa)

  *) And the usuall suspects like ClamAV, SpamAssassin, …

  This solution provides:

  *) Basic Mail (Relay, Server, Storage, …)

  *) Webmail (through SOGO)

  *) Calendar and address book Web UI

  *) Calendar and address book for a desktop client like Thunderbird (CalDAV, CardDAV)

  *) Web-Based Admin UI for both admins and users (to manage their own accounts)

  *) Integration with smartphones (mail, calendar, address book)

  *) Features like shared mailboxes, shared calendars, …

  *) Easy integration with all typical Unix/Linux services (Fileserver, Webserver, VPN, …)

  I have no experience with Exchange (and I refuse to get any), but I have “some” with Unix/Linux (since 1990. Yes I’m old ;-)

  For me the above mentined software stack “just works” and it does for the more advanced business use case, too.

  I can’t say anything about solutions for thousands of users, though, so YMMV!

  Regards

  – – andreas

  –

• I think we didn’t hear about some important points:

  How many people in your IT-department?
  How large is your organization?
  What do your users need and want?
  Where is your experience?

  The reason I am asking the third question is that exchange is certainly not only a mail system. It offers a lot of other functionality like calendar and I don’t know what. For me, it was an easy decision. More than 20 years ago my organization wanted to implement a mail system. Microsoft was a t that time still in stone age and it may be that they didn’t even have a server based solution available at that time. Bottom line, if you are heading for a mail server system, go for Postfix, dovecot, etc. Btw., we NEVER lost a single mail. I still have mails from 1998 :-)

  Both paths may be suitable, but with Linux, you are pretty safe of nasty things that do not do as you want. I know that this MS-bugs bother me a lot at my users workstations, so why should it be different at the server side.

  Michael

  Michael

• And does that calendar solution allow for things like:

  1) Allowing all users in the organization to see users calendars and see when they are free to schedule a meeting with them.

  2) Allow for designated people to schedule meetings for others (ie, your secretary/office assistant can schedule meetings for people, etc.)

  3) Allow a calendar to schedule shared items .. like meeting rooms, shared vehicles, etc. So that people can check those out for specifc time windows, etc.

  Those are just a couple of minor things a lot of solutions can’t do

  And do they work with imap, etc. Zimbra does not work very well with Thunderbird and Lighting (for example) .. many solutions don’t work with Windows or Mac clients, etc.

• Zarafa is also a very good Linux Exchange Like !!!

  —
  (°- Bernard Lheureux
  //\ Linux System Administrator v_/_ MailTo:bernard@lheureux.be

• Am 18.07.2018 um 20:27 schrieb Johnny Hughes :

  did you checked this

  http://sabre.io/baikal/

  http://sabre.io/

• Yes at least about a part of it: calendars can be shared with some people or with everybody (which we didn’t do, so I may be not 100%
  presenting “experimental fact” here). Not certain about “free/not free”
  mapped on calendars though.

  Yes, you can share calendar with anybody, and can set any set of choices

  can read can write can “re-share” your calendar

  You can share stuff to external people, and set individual authentication for them independent of our system (in general, it is not just calendars, but we use it for mostly synchronizing between all of your devices, and also sharing: files, calendars, address book; it can also be bookmarks, and there are variety of plugins expanding what else can be accessed/synchronized via web/dav)

  No, but for resource booking (if I read the question correctly) we use mrbs (https://mrbs.sourceforge.io/). I know, that is not “integrated”
  for you to have everything in one place. I never had time to look for extention/plugin to suck from mrbs booked slot into one’s calendar.

  No, owncloud/nextcloud don’t work with IMAP as far as I know. Mail server is separate issue. Zimbra in that respect IS “integrated collaborative environment”. And so is Kolab. They both are lacking per-user spam preferences. One more thing that added some minus for each of them in my estimate what to choose is: behind each of them there is commercial company. And that in my looooong experience significantly increases the chance one day openly available incarnation of each may become no longer available for us, and I will have to find replacement in a rush and find the way to migrate to it, and the more sophisticated the thing is, the trickier the migration will be.

  My answers are mostly about owncloud which we use for quite some time. Nextcloud is fork of owncloud, and to my regret nextcloud doesn’t work with PostgreSQL, only with mysql/MariaDB, whereas owncloud works with PostgreSQL as well as with mysql/MariaDB (still we have some reasons to migrate to nextcloud at some point).

  I hope, someone with more knowledge will chime in.

  Valeri

• I’m going to recommend going with a hosted solution if possible like google or office365. Assuming you have to host it I recommend Zimbra for a good Linux solution that is very much like exchange. Zimbra collaboration suite server can even act like an exchange server to android/ios devices and outlook for the paid for version. It is about as easy to setup/configure and maintain as exchange is. Note: I have maintained a 600 user Zimbra server for almost 10 years now. I have maintained postfix, sendmail, devcot, spam assassin, etc in the past too so I kinda.. kinda know a little bit about this stuff. Rolling your own now days is not worth it in most cases.

  David Miller.

  —– Original Message —

• Why are you multiposting this question to multiple mailing lists?

  –keith

• Depend on what you define as “work with IMAP”, Nextcloud does not come with IMAP server, but installing an IMAP server on the side of Nextcloud/Owncloud using the same storage probably not that difficult. Furthermore, Nextcloud can have IMAP as authentication backend, and also have extension that allow accessing IMAP from inside Nextcloud interface, make it easier to give impression of integration to users.

  That said, if the code actually FOSS, then anybody who is willing can fork the last FOSS code and continue developing it, and we have many of those, like Illumos out of Open Solaris, LibreOffice out of OpenOffice, MariaDB out of MySQL, Bareos out of Bacula, etc.

  Not true, Nextcloud can have PostgreSQL as database backend:
  https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/12/admin_manual/configuration_database/linux_database_configuration.html

• Don’t get me wrong. I’ve run qmail, postfix, and zimbra mail servers with IMAP, along with webmail front ends (roundcude, squirrel mail, etc), for windows, mac and linux clients for several companies (all on CentOS of course :D) .. I just don’t think that calendaring that I have seen is as user friendly as google calendar (for example). But I’m all for people running mail servers on CentOS (or any other Linux) if they want !

• No, I’m not getting you wrong. You gave nicely put set of properties
  [some]one may be interested to know of, which I tried to answer. Also:
  Thanks, Arif, for correcting/expanding in the other post what I said about owncloud/nextcloud. That was extremely helpful!

  
  As far as google anything goes, not everybody volunteers one’s information into paws of google (and quite likely one or more of 3
  letter agencies collecting information that way). I know (call it educated guess) that about 70% of messages I send are ending up in google databases whether I want it or not. Someone said quite some time ago: you don’t need to recruit spies anymore, just roll out “free”
  services, and information will trickle to you. I am old enough to know what collection of information on everybody leads to (Hitler Germany, Stalin Russia, …), but I also know that the worst lesson of history is: people do not learn lessons of history. So, I do the best I can do:
  roll out services people I work for may need, and avoid by any means advertising google whatever myself, I just keep neutral when that surfaces in discussions with my people.
  

  Valeri

  —
  ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
  Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
  ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

• Well said. I feel that too many people today have forgotten (or, more likely, never learned) these lessons from history. People give away their personal and supposedly private information too easily and, I feel certain, will come to regret it (some already have come to regret it).

• Valeri Galtsev wrote:
  
  
  Yep. That’s why I refuse to have a google account, and why I recommended against it for business use. I have no knowledge, but even if you pay google for a “private” business account, I have next to no trust that they do not have something scanning for info to sell, or market to – we all
  *know* they do that to all free email accounts.

  “First, do no harm”? Long gone, eaten by their marketing dept, which is why the signal-to-noise ratio has gone *way* down in the laft five years.

  I’ll stop the rant now, too, it’s OT for the list.

  mark

• Your points are valid for sure .. but if you are not encrypting your email, then all of it is likely being scanned and saved anyway. Any router along the way can log packets and see whatever is transmitted that is not encrypted.

  Most of the world uses android phones (I think it is like 75% now) and all the mail that goes there is available to google as well, right?

  Not to say I like it .. I don’t. But people want it to work, work in a user friendly way and convenient access from everywhere .. and from their phone, their home pc, while traveling, etc.

• While I agree with the above, it doesn’t really address Johnny’s question, which is which open source calendaring projects can compete with Google calendar for users’ ease of use? If I give my users Zimbra, and they hate it, then what? For simple email use, there are plenty of clients which can talk IMAP/SMTP to a linux server, but the options for calendaring (and ”groupware” in general) are much sparser.

  It’s a hard question, and each organization needs to weigh their privacy concerns against their users’ requirements.

  –keith

• 19 jul 2018 kl. 20:33 skrev Keith Keller :

  Just to chime in, I’m using Fruux.com for a client, and while it’s not per se an open source service, it works really really well and uses open source protocols for its operation (CalDAV and CardDAV). They also have great central administration, even if it’s all local accounts. They use SabreDAV as the foundation for the service, hence I think it’s worth mentioning.

  Regards, Leo

• —– Original Message —

• Le 18/07/2018 à 17:04, Turritopsis Dohrnii Teo En Ming a écrit :

  I’m running a few bone-headed mail servers for schools and small companies. They’re all bone-headed setups on CentOS. I’d say mail servers are not the easiest thing to configure under Linux. Anyway, here’s all the ingredients I’m using.

  * https://blog.microlinux.fr/postfix-CentOS/

  * https://blog.microlinux.fr/dovecot-CentOS/

  * ttps://blog.microlinux.fr/postfix-dovecot-ssl-CentOS/

  * https://blog.microlinux.fr/spamassassin-CentOS/

  * https://blog.microlinux.fr/squirrelmail/

  Cheers,

  Niki

  —
  Microlinux – Solutions informatiques durables
  7, place de l’église – 30730 Montpezat Site : https://www.microlinux.fr Blog : https://blog.microlinux.fr Mail : info@microlinux.fr Tél. : 04 66 63 10 32

• I can’t use google calendar because it used tracking cookies which I block.

  So it doesn’t work for me.

  Would actually love to see a distributed / federated calendaring platform developed, that I suspect would do well.

  What I mean is Company A can choose to federate with Company B when needed to allow cross-scheduling when needed while both still maintain complete ownership of their calendar data.

• Owncloud and nextcloud support federation.

  Valeri

  —
  ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
  Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
  ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

• A public SMTP server is not the easiest thing to configure, period. It is the quintessential rope on which many admins hang themselves.

  –keith

• Le 20/07/2018 à 07:44, Keith Keller a écrit :

  It’s not rocket science either, but you have to be willing to read (a lot) and experiment (a lot).

  In France we have an expression for misconfigured public SMTP servers.

  “Pompe à merde”.

  :o)

  Niki

  —
  Microlinux – Solutions informatiques durables
  7, place de l’église – 30730 Montpezat Site : https://www.microlinux.fr Blog : https://blog.microlinux.fr Mail : info@microlinux.fr Tél. : 04 66 63 10 32

• Just out of curiosity, why are you not using something like Kolab or Zimbra?

• History is the practice of justifying the present by rewriting the past.

• Le 20/07/2018 à 09:12, Promise Kumalo a écrit :

  Don’t know. Never tried these, because I’m comfortable with Postfix, Dovecot and Spamassassin. I might give these a spin though.

  Thanks for the heads up.

  Niki

  —
  Microlinux – Solutions informatiques durables
  7, place de l’église – 30730 Montpezat Site : https://www.microlinux.fr Blog : https://blog.microlinux.fr Mail : info@microlinux.fr Tél. : 04 66 63 10 32

• You also need to be willing to stay on top of your outgoing mail to make sure your network isn’t sending spam, and you need to monitor the various blacklists to make sure your SMTP servers are not ending up on them. It’s not like (for example) an IMAP server, which once you have working is mostly maintenance-free.

  –keith

  —
  kkeller@wombat.san-francisco.ca.us

• My belated addition. This is great overview of nextcloud vs ovncloud features (which makes evident the set of abilities of each):

  https://civihosting.com/blog/nextcloud-vs-owncloud/

  Valeri

  —
  ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
  Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
  ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

• I like to say that Windows is easier to install and initially configure, but Linux is much easier to FIX. Things will always go wrong. Closed-source Windows software hides everything and its GUI often lies about the true state of what’s going on under the hood. Open-source software can be cracked open and I can dig down to root cause of any problems. Check out the free support forums at Microsoft. It’s pretty hopeless. Responses to problems with open source software are generally much more informative. Open source advocates love to show off how they can fix problems. Closed source engineers aren’t allowed to share solutions with the public. If you really want support, you’re going to have to pay for it. So pay for the product, pay for the support, and nag them like you own them. Or go with open source and pay a consultant. (Or a hungry college student.)

• folks, didn’t anybody check the name of this guy?

  Turritopsis Dohrnii Teo En Ming
  drops a bomb with provocative questions every now and then and NEVER
  ever responds to his own bullshit. He is just a troll!

  Michael

• And on top of all: MS Windows is the only systems I know of whose vendor tells you, it is not safe to run without 3rd party software (antivirus).

  Antivirus itself is fundamentally flawed idea: you can not enumerate bad. You can enumerate good and prohibit everything else. So, antivirus is like thinking backwards. (But given long record of MS in building poorly architectured system, doing antivirus is sort of job security ;-)

  Valeri

  ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
  Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
  ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

• AFAIK (my son runs Windows, to my shame) Windows now comes bundled with antivirus software. I have no idea if it actually works or not.

  –keith

• This is why I asked him why he multiposted to different lists: I saw the same allegation in the Ubuntu group. (Multiposting itself is one minor sign of trolling.)

  FWIW he did respond to a small handful of messages in this thread.

  –keith

• Yes, isn’t it blatant? MS makes defective systems that attract malicious software (viruses) then claims its anti-virus SW is an extra added attraction. No doubt they monetize it somehow.Too baroque for me.

  The apt cache description of xbill (qv) is just right:

  “Ever get the feeling that nothing is going right? You’re a sysadmin, and someone’s trying to destroy your computers. The little people running around the screen are trying to infect your computers with Wingdows [TM], a virus cleverly designed to resemble a popular operating system. Your objective is to click the mouse on them, ending their potential threat. If one of the people reaches a computer, it will attempt to replace your operating system with the virus it carries. It will then attempt to run off the screen with your vital software.”

  Dave

• This may be the case, but for me, who has been a sysadmin for longer than I
  care to admit, it has come up with some gems that I’m now looking into.

• OK, what you say is true in theory. However, in Thunderbird on Linux and using Mac clients, etc .. and certainly on Windows workstation clients using outlook .. zimbra does not work well. It also does not work well on people’s smart phone calendars. People want their phone to remind them of their appointments .. any solution that is iffy doing that is just unacceptable in this day and age.

• It’s a generalization. Not valid for all people.

  Maybe SOME people want their phone to remind them of their appointsments.

  My appointments are synchronized from owncloud to Thunderbird and to many (LineageOS-based) smartphones and tablets and >>I<< do NOT want to be reminded on the smartphones and tablets, but ONLY on Thunderbird desktop client. Regards, Meikel

• —– Original Message —

• And if some of those people are in your organization then you probably need to support them. You can’t just tell them to suck it up just because you want to use Zimbra (for example) instead of Google. (If on the other hand your bosses require you to host your data instead of using Google then you may get away with telling them to suck it up.)

  –keith

• I’m not sure how long it’s been available, but Zimbra supports Exchange ActiveSync.  Windows workstation clients using Outlook shouldn’t see any difference between Zimbra and Exchange, if it’s implemented properly.

  Personally, I use SOGo (which also supports EAS).  It didn’t get many mentions in the this thread, which is unfortunate because it’s *really*
  good.

• Am 28.07.2018 um 00:09 schrieb Gordon Messmer:

  Please pay attention that you will have to pay extra for ActiveSync to Microsoft as SOGo does not cover that. Expressively documented by the project.

  Alexander