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.    
__________________Administrative Staff, Tezcatlipoca Inc._____________________

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