> Wow.  why in the world would a person need/want/think about 
> 50K messages 
> in a mailbox?

I'm on many different mailing lists for various software packages, security
lists, and other things.  Plus, I get several hundred emails a week from
people I work with on various issues.  I get nearly 1000 messages a day, and
most get deleted.  I delete what I can do without, but I really need to keep
as much around as possible in case I need to look back on it.  I lost about
3 months of mail from late 1999, and I find myself needing to go back and
find stuff from then fairly often.  My mailbox tends to act as my memory for
almost all of my work related stuff.  If I delete something, chances are I
will forget the details of it 3 months later.

One of the Kmail developers told me that Outlook uses IMAP to pull mail from
an exchange server, but I think he's wrong.  Outlook connects to ports 1225
and 1226 on the exchange server, not the IMAP port.  Exchange sends
notifications to the client when new mail arrives also, with IMAP, you have
to check every few minutes.  Having the scheduling, mail, task lists, and
other things all together is actually nice once you've gotten used to it.
I'm much more productive now that I was at my last company where we had
separate systems for everything, and no integrated scheduling.  I think the
concept of Exchange/Lotus Notes is right, but the implementations suck.
Outlook is bloated and slow, Exchange is buggy, Notes just plain sucks ass
in all respects (except for the "runs on Solaris" part).  PHPGroupware is
nice, but the requirement of a web interface to use it sucks, although, I
think they are working on a KDE or GNOME client that just pulls and posts
XML in the background.

Isn't The Kompany working on an integrated system for Aethera?  Or was that
the gnome people for Evolution?  Right now, there are no open standards for
this type of thing, and there needs to be.  Even better, whatever kind of
server that ends up getting developed for linux needs to have some sort of
connector to MS Exchange so companies could have a nice easy migration path,
instead of just tearing out one system and replacing it with another.  And
it also needs to have some sort of clustering/redundancy built in.  Notes
and Exchange have a rather poor implementation of clustering, but it does
work, and it will most likely save your ass if one of the servers
dies/crashes/explodes.  I know I wouldn't implement any kind of mailserver
solution in a large corporate environment without some sort of failover
(preferably transparent).  Failover should be easy, just replicate every
database transaction to your standby server, and use tools from the linuxHA
project to do the actual failover monitoring.  I don't know how easy it is
to replicate both ways, but if it was easy, setting up a cluster using the
linux virtual server would be fairly trivial also.

Bah, enough of my ranting.  I have work to do.  In fact, work to do on
mailservers, something which I'm quite sick of.

Jay



> 
> duncan
> 
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