MS mail problems
From: abbyfg@tezcat.com (Abby Franquemont-Guillory)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.advocacy,alt.destroy.microsoft,comp.windows.misc,alt.sysadmin.recovery
Subject: Re: MS mail vs. Unix mail
A number of other problems with MS Mail:
1. No enclosures possible through gateways -- enclosures in the
gateways almost invariably result in looped mail being delivered
again and again every 2 minutes or so until all the servers crash
and burn and you have to dump lots of unidentifiable stuff from
the queues.
2. Money. It costs a lot more money. Everything needs a gateway
component, and they're all expensive.
3. Limitation on the number of users you can have per post office
-- after about 250 it starts to croak.
4. Problems with address books, address list synchronization, mail
delivery, and failed mail result in enormous amounts of user
confusion, despite the kind of pretty GUI. Figure half of your
help desk's time (literally, no kidding) will be spent on MS
Mail problems.
5. Remote client cannot connect at any speed higher than 2400 baud.
6. Multiple post offices are a nightmare, and become necessary as
soon as you hit the 250-user mark.
7. All user mail is stored in one single encrypted file, called the
MMF, which is easily corrupted if users do not manage their mail
with care. Once corruption reaches one portion of the MMF, which
is also much larger than a plaintext file would be, there is no
saving the file and archived mail is lost.
8. SMTP gateways are about as far as you can get from compliance
with RFC 822 and still pretend to think about it.
9. SMTP gateways have a tendency to reformat mail for no particular
reason as well as truncating it for no reason, splitting it into
several parts, failing to talk properly with sendmail, queuing
mail without notifying anyone, crashing, and throwing everything
into the bit bucket.
10. MS support sucks green monkey dicks.
11. Remote client does not adequately support very many different types
of modems, and I have never seen it actually work with a PCMCIA
modem, which diminishes its usefulness if you've got people travelling
with laptops.
12. It's a nightmare to deal with situations like a user who has a PC in
the office and a laptop they take on the road, and they want to have
all their mail all the time.
13. Requires gateway components (expensive) to work cross-platform.
14. Client is far clunkier than most POP clients.
15. Personal address books store all addresses ever sent to, including
local addresses in the global address list, resulting in enormous
problems if local users ever have their addresses changed, or removed,
which frankly is unavoidable.
16. Did I say no MIME support?
17. Makes you look like an idiot when you're sending mail to people on
the Internet who actually use *real* mailers.
18. Will leave your entire support staff sobbing in anguish, until they
all quit, except for the ones who refuse to come back from lunch.
I spent two years responsible for an MS Mail system, and I assure you, I know
whereof I speak, exactly whereof I speak, oh yes, indeed I do. And when all
was said and done, after 2 years of campaigning to get a better mail package,
the entire company eventually agreed with me and started to work on converting
to a POP mail solution.
--
______________________________________________________________________________
Abby Franquemont-Guillory | Infamous Devil's Advocate
abbyfg@tezcat.com | "En ingles, como se dice la palabra brown?"
news@tezcat.com | Tezcat -- su internet mas emocionante.
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