[Gllug] Exchange -> IMAP

[John Edwards]

On Mon, Aug 18, 2003 at 05:07:53PM +0100, Paul Lee wrote:
<snip>

> I switched a small business over from NT/Exchange to Linux/Postfix/Cyrus 
> Imap with Horde and it worked very well.

Some people find that a web interface is much slower and doesn't have 
the required features of a full client program. Horde has the pretty 
bells and whistles but the code base was rather hairy and changable 
when I last looked at it (about a year ago). Squirelmail looks cleaner 
and seems faster (IMHO).

Some advantages of a Unix system can be spam filtering (SpamAssassin), 
greater control over the filtering of email (eg keep a copy of all 
outgoing email), and some much bettering mailing list managers.


> To copy mail out of the exchange system I merely set up the two servers 
> and dragged and dropped the mail over from Exchange to Cyrus using 
> Outlook Express. Dare say there is a more sophisticated way.

Some versions of Outlook or Outlook Express used the more-or-less mbox 
format (can't remember which), and you could then import into Cyrus. 
I would not consider that to be 100% safe though.

Copying between servers is slow, but usually OK with you have an IMAP 
clients that can copying a folder hierarchy (Outlook Express can't).


> Only thing you might want to watch is the close integration between 
> Outlook and Exchange, as people think the calender and scheduling stuff 
> under Windows is great.

The email/contacts/calendar integration is the main reason to use 
Exchange, and the main reason why Unix replacements are had to find.

Contacts can be done using LDAP, though some time needs to be spent 
setting up OpenLDAP before it's ready for ues with most clients.


> You don't have to use Cyrus, as there are other IMAP servers, and Cyrus 
> admin is a bit command line and arcane for some, though webmin modules 
> do exist.

Cyrus is very robust, though the automation tools usually require 
the writing of a few scripts in Tcl (v1) or Perl (v2). The shared 
folders systems is much better done than Courier and UW-IMAP.


> I'd be tempted to consider the SuSE Linux OpenExchange Server which 
> wraps the whole thing up with a good web based user interface.

I found the OpenExchange server to be very slow, even with only one 
or two users. Hardware was a Pentium3 1GHz with 256MB RAM.

Bynari and HP OpenMail are two other alternatives, but pricing was 
aimed at the large scale last time I looked.

Also the O'Reilly IMAP book is worth looking at, and covers Cyrus 
and UW-IMAP servers as well as the protocol and some clients program. 
There are example scripts using Tcl and Perl for admin and conversion.


-- 
#--------------------------------------------------------#
|       John Edwards    Email: John.Edwards at uk.com       |
|                                                        |
|  "SEP is intended as a management routing protocol,    |
|   and should not be used in a production enviroment."  |
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