Open source e-mail solutions attracting current Exchange customers

Although the solutions available have a stripped down open source version, to get anywhere near Exchange capability you have to buy their non-free version, which although cheaper than Exchange, is still shockingly expensive.

Interestingly enough though, small businesses often don't need the full functionality of exchange anyway so they end up benefiting from the open source versions well enough.

Sometimes I feel like the sad, lonesome prophet in the wilderness, because a sizable chunk of the costs of the OSS products are for Outlook compatibility. WHYYYYY! Outlook is teh suck. Outlook is the biggest virus vector there is. Outlook is buggy and stupid. Use Firefox as your universal client- easy peasey, and you get full functionality without stupid Outlook hacks.

I don't care for per-user licensing on server products, FOSS or no. That is lame and greedy, and something people forget about when they criticize the high cost of RHEL, for one example. You pay once for RHEL, then you bomb it with as many clients as you want. Red Hat doesn't tax you for actually connecting clients to your server, which is what they're made for. duhh.

I like Citadel a lot. Check it out if you're looking for a 100% FOSS groupware/messaging server. No tricksy licenses or fees, just a good solid product.

TC,

Some of the people I consult for have a hard time attaching something to an email (user knowledge is VERY low). In these cases, they've only used webmail (hotmail) and getting them to use something different isn't cost effective for a small 1 man company that I have. so instead, I have to often make the user feel comfortable despite my want to push them to something that, if they learned it, would increase their production by leaps and bounds. Unfortunately, they don't see the course of things 10-20 miles down the road, they only see to the next bend.

It sure is sad. Outlook is teh suck. I at least get them to use thunderbird and plug it into vtiger :) That they can use :)

I work for a company in the 1500-2500 email users range. We introduced email to the company on redhat, and eventually brought it to SuSE. It just worked. In the end, we lost the battle for three reasons: Outlook, Active Directory and Calendaring. So now I run Outlook via rdesktop on terminal server and play click and wait. But hey, the marketing department has calendars. The Exchange Killer I was looking for 3 years ago may have finally materialized, and not a moment too soon.....

Dave

tuxchick: Thanks for the Citadel tip! How well does the spam blocking work on this? (I haven't tried spamassassin yet). We have had great results from Declude + MessageSniffer, and I am quite fearful that switching may increase spam?

pcatiprodotnet

Spamassassin works quite well for the small businesses I consult for. One small business in particular went from getting hundreds of messages of SPAM daily to getting about 3-4 that made it through the screening.

At my full time job, we have Barracuda. It's quite nice as well...but honestly, working with both spamassassin and barracuda...I wouldn't recommend Barracuda for small businesses because using an offsite mailserver with Spamassassin is much easier, just as good, and requires no EQ cost or maintenance.