A must when contemplating a Sendmail environment is to purchase a copy of the O'Reilly -Bat" book (Building, Installing, and Administering Sendmail by Bryan Costales with Eric Allman) -- this is a comprehensive guide to pretty much anything one needs to know about Sendmail and is extremely easy to follow.
One thing that Sendmail has never been known for is its ease of configuration (particularly the virtually cryptographic Sendmail.cf file), while it is simple to get up and running fine tuning and tweaking it can leave one a little wobbly in the knees let alone in the head. Don't worry if you need help or extra features and are willing to pay for them, the developers of the freeware version of Sendmail have a commercial company, see www.sendmail.com.
A myriad of open-source plug-in applications are available for managing and monitoring Sendmail. A very popular tool for those with a GUI bend on Linux is Webmin. I ran up a server with Slackware 10.0, Sendmail and installed Webmin for the purposes of this review. Webmin not only manages Sendmail but also many other aspects of Linux applications and their associated configuration. And the best bit is the author of Webmin comes from Melbourne. Ok so it is a bit of a soft option for most hardcore Linux nuts out there who prefer the CLI but some people must eventually grow up and realise not everyone is a ubergeek super programmer who live, eat and breath in vi commands. In that vein if you are looking for a laugh then check out www.ubergeek.tv.
It is a very reliable, robust, scalable solution when combined with Webmin, and a decent Linux distribution should give the owner many years of faithful service. If you haven't tried it, get the book and give it a spin in a test environment -- you should be pleasantly surprised.
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Interesting review, however, it misses in a nunber of areas.
1) At the low end of the market, the appropriate Microsoft product would be SBS2003. It is quite difficult to price the e-mail component as a number of products are bundled, however, I suspect the SBS2003 is a more appropriate product when compared with some of the lower end e-mail systems you have reviewed. Are you comparing apples with apples? or apples to oranges?
2) The the high-end of the market where clustering / high availability and a large number of users is concerned most of the reviewed packages couldn't deliver. Where is the indication of where these products sit in terms of number of users?
3) The most important criteria for purchasing an e-mail system has not even been considered, i.e. user understanding and productivity. Given the article asks the question about alternatives to Exchange, surely there needs to be some indication as to why customers continually purchase this product. And the answer is they understand how to use the client interface, i.e. Outlook, and individuals are productive. My feedback from people is they hate Notes (especially after using Outlook / Exchange) and they love the functionality and integration that Outlook / Exchange provides. An e-mail system is provided to enhance user/worker productivity and, essentially, they don't give a stuff about the e-mail server. They want functionality they can easily use on their client device and this is what IT Managers respond to.
4) I would suggest you have under-estimated Notes and Exchange for their back-end automation. Notes is a powerful database / workflow solution that provides much more than e-mail, so if you have such a requirement the other e-mail solutions look very ordinary. Likewise with Exchange, there is a huge amount automation / programming that can be achieved and an organisation with such requirements would seek a single solution rather than 2 separate systems.
Regards,
Russell Sumich