Unix/BSD geeks help!

[nagal]

This weekend I am rebuilding my home server to run FreeBSD again. The only thing I will miss is MS Exchange 2003. Is there a FREE open source alternative to Exchange that will work with Outlook? I checked into Open XChange but sadly to get the Outlook Connector you have to shell out a large sum of money.

I can live without Exchange but my wife will miss the instant deliveries of email.

Any ideas/suggestions?

[Navy-Jeepster]

Take a look at this link.
http://www3.telus.net/public/dale_d/email.html

Also, try a search on www.justlinux.com in their forums.
I found many topics on this.

Hope this helps.

Todd
Navy-Jeepster
Gold Digger

[nagal]

Thanks for the info, I'll try the forums. I have no problem setting up an email server (QMail my perfered one) but Exchange is a lot more that just an email server.

[mparker]

What are you looking for from the mail server. Exchange does a lot of things.

Obviously the mail server portion is important, but what of the other features were you looking for.

There are several open source groupware projects that would allow you to share calendars etc.

What about the OWA stuff, were you intereted in the webmail portion of it?

Blackberry tie ins important?

I haven't been a sysadmin for over 6 years, but i still try to keep up to date, i can also hit up the current sysadmin at our company, he is so staunchly anti-microsoft it's a little scary. so he may have an idea or 647.

One other thing, do you have a preffered mail reading method between POP3 and IMAP, because some of the groupware stuff doesn't do IMAP.

[TrAvELAr]

There is an Open Exchange project which is actually pretty good. It's a very painful install tho as there are a lot of dependencies that aren't always obvious (at least the last time I installed it there were).

There are a lot of options, but it depends on what you actually want your mail server to do, how many people/domains you are hosting, etc. Give me some info and I'll tell you what I think.

[nagal]

Open Exchange is not an option as the Outlook Connector is not free ware.

It seems like it is going to be a mute issue as I do not want to hack together a ton of open source apps so Outlook will continue to operate like Outlook connected to an Exchange server.

All of this is for my home server. Being that my wife is use to instant deliver of email (a nice feature of Exchange) and I wanted to avoid any nagging/complaints that she only gets email updates every 5 minutes (or whatever you set the POP settings to) but will have to live with it.

[TrAvELAr]

Why not use IMAP? It's instant and Outlook supports it.

[nagal]

Last time I looked into Qmail + IMAP I wanted to cry. I will look into it again as I dont remember what exactly about the combo wanted me to cry

[mparker]

Why not use IMAP? It's instant and Outlook supports it.

Ditto that... MAPI was originally written to give MS something as good as IMAP. Hence the similarities in the acronyms.

[nagal]

I just found out why IMAP is not an option... Outlook 2000 does not support it.

[TrAvELAr]

Outlook 2000 does not support it.

Does to.

-In Outlook 2000, click on the Tools menu, then click Options
-Click the Mail Delivery tab, then click on Reconfigure Mail Support
-Click Internet Only, then click Next

Once you select this, you'll be able to chose pop3 or imap as a protocol.

[jmbrowning]

I personally like Cyrus IMAP, it's very flexible and can be setup as a USENET type BBS (public IMAP folders) with read,write, erase, delete privileges. Great for large multi-user systems where collaboration is a needed feature.

For simple mail storage, however, UW IMAP is just fine and you can read email with vi (or even cat)!

[nagal]

Does to.

-In Outlook 2000, click on the Tools menu, then click Options
-Click the Mail Delivery tab, then click on Reconfigure Mail Support
-Click Internet Only, then click Next

Once you select this, you'll be able to chose pop3 or imap as a protocol.

I guess thats what I get for trusting my google search about Outlook 200 IMAP support... glad I have a Travelar on my side

I personally like Cyrus IMAP, it's very flexible and can be setup as a USENET type BBS (public IMAP folders) with read,write, erase, delete privileges. Great for large multi-user systems where collaboration is a needed feature.

For simple mail storage, however, UW IMAP is just fine and you can read email with vi (or even cat)!

I have looked at Cyrus before, will check it out again... of course you get uber geek status for suggesting to use cat to read email.

[TrAvELAr]

I guess thats what I get for trusting my google search about Outlook 200 IMAP support... glad I have a Travelar on my side

It's outlook 2000 not Outlook 200.

Now... I use Qmail with courier IMAP and a Squirellmail frontend. It works great, except for contacts. I'm trying to get OpenLDAP working the way I want it to, just can't seem to write contacts to the server yet. We'll get there.

[NAILER341]

wow.. this lingo is worse than jeep lingo. GEEKS!