I'm putting this under a different subject, so people can freely delete the entire thread if they like. :) > From a corporate point of view Exchange is a pretty sweet setup. In > addition to integrating e-mail, address book and scheduling services, it > makes it easy to apply consistent policies across the company. If the > legal weenies say that internal e-mails should be archived for 6 months > and external e-mails for 3 years, Exchange can do that for you. If you > want deleted messages to be available for recovery for 45 days, Exchange > can do that as well. Of course it integrates into the existing MS > security model for dealing with authenticating users and assigning > privileges, and it can provide access to pop/imap clients and web > browsers as well. This is one of the most reasoned arguments I've heard in favor of Exchange. Thank you. :) my main concerns with Exchange are: a. it stores its messages in binary database files; so I can't readily use tools like grep, grepmail, procmail, vi, and logrotate to manage them. :) b. from what I hear, these files get corrupted on a regular basis; and they take *forever* to fix. I know of an administrator who has a quad xeon box, just for rebuilding corrupt Exchange databases. (and it still takes many hours to rebuild them). c. I've seen Exchange spontaneously change settings without telling the administrator; such as opening itself up as a relay for the world. (this seems to be on a par with other MS products, and the primary reason I gave up Windows). does anyone have reasonable responses for these? (of course, reason d. is that 'it only runs on Windows'; but I want to just examine the application here, not the underlying OS). Carl Soderstrom. -- Systems Administrator Real-Time Enterprises www.real-time.com