[Gllug] thunderbird exchange and additional mailboxes

[Russell Howe]

Not sure what the webmail did to that message, but anyway, about Outlook Web
Access (OWA) and Exchange....

OWA talks to Exchange via WebDAV, no? (well, the email portion of it may well
talk IMAP to the Exchange server, I guess). This is how I believe Evolution's
Exchange Connector works. It uses the WebDAV interface that is provided for OWA,
rather than talking whatever (presumably complex) protocol Outlook uses on the
wire.

Since the place I work for didn't use any of Exchange's features and just used it
as a shared contact and email store, I migrated everything to IMAP on a Linux box
with contact details stored in a mixture of LDAP and a database (which was
pre-existing, but never updated because managing contacts in Outlook was
'easier'). That database is dumped into an LDAP server every hour, providing
contact information from email clients too. What I still need to do is either
perform the dump and import more frequently (and efficiently - it's a 5 minute
job at the moment) or write some scary T-SQL (yes, it's SQL Server 2k) to do LDAP
updates when the contacts database is updated. The prospect of that scares me a
little. The other option is to rewrite the database client to do the LDAP update.
We can't modify it without either asking the company which wrote it to, or
buying a VB development suite, so would have to rewrite it).

Things are currently a little sluggish, due to a mix of slow disks (which have
no reason to be slow whatsoever - fibrechannel-attached SCSI hardware RAID giving
10Mbyte/s, wtf?!) and the email box which is only something like a dual P2 300.
imapd processes regularly peg a CPU at 90-100% usage. Only 128M RAM in that box
too, and it's not unusual for it to hit swap.

Hopefully soon the late Exchange server can be used to run IMAP (dual P3 1GHz,
1.5G RAM :) but we need to switch some hardware out of it to another box, as well
as demote it from whatever the active directory equivalent of a BDC is.

As an aside (as if the above wasn't enough of an aside!), for anyone looking to
move a lot of email from Outlook to something else, I would strongly suggest
using Exchange to do it - move email into Exchange, and then move it out via
Exchange's IMAP server. Why? Exchange seems to decode the travesty that is TNEF
when serving email via IMAP. Not only that, but it sometimes even decodes email
addresses in the headers properly (otherwise, you often get X.500/LDAP-style
DN's as email addresses in the headers).

Only real problem I found was that Exchange (at least Exchange 2000)'s IMAP
server was agonisingly slow (the dual P3 described above, was slower running
Exchange's IMAP server than the dual P2 running Courier)

I'd like to see what effect switching filesystems on the mail server will have
too - with the current 128M RAM, things like XFS will probably choke the box.
1.5G is much healthier and gives more room to play.

Still, it holds its own with maybe 40-80 concurrent logins via IMAP (most via
SSL)

For those who are interested (anyone?), the dual P2 is a Compaq Proliant 3000,
and the dual P3 is (I think) a DL380 or 360 (It's 4U...).

One thing which I really want to see from Thunderbird would be native TNEF
handling - there are several decoders out there, and it probably wouldn't be too
hard to hack in, or at least a TNEF-handling extension.

-- 
Russell Howe
russell_howe at wreckage.org 




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