Brian Candler writes:

It is a race, and it's against Exchange.

Our public servers may have that many, but the dedicated servers we put in have a lot less. However, people see what Exchange has to offer and ask why our system doesn't do that. It doesn't matter that the feature is worthless, or that the system is unreliable, they want Exchange. It is, after all, the "industry standard."

And so would I, if by then we still had any customers who found "not Exchange" to be acceptable as a mail server. Their decision is not based upon technical merits but upon cosmetics and tick lists. One of our guys who deals with on-site installation/maintenance replaced a dedicated mail server with Exchange. He was impressed with it because OWA made the webmail look exactly like using Outlook so people didn't have to learn how to drive a webmail that worked differently from Outlook. And the people who were using it were impressed too. Exchange is no longer a simple mail/webmail/imap/pop3 server, it has scheduling and groupware that is integrated with Outlook - I'm not saying these are things I want or would use but our customers do.

The race is to get Open Source products that come close enough to duplicating Exchange functionality and can be installed painlessly enough that they are economically viable.

In an ideal world it would not concern me if they switched to Exchange. In this world, however, building dedicated mail servers around qmail/ courier-imap/sqwebmail is one of the things that pays my wages. Since I like getting paid, I would prefer them not to switch to Exchange.

Yes I am serious, because management here is coming to the conclusion that we can't make money out of selling dedicated mail servers unless we put in Exchange. And that in the longer term we'll probably have to switch the public servers to Exchange too, just to give people the features they think they want (but don't actually need). If we don't then our customers will switch to somebody else that can offer Exchange-based mail, even if they charge more for it.

Only if the package included all the other stuff that Exchange does. And it does it using Exchange's own protocols rather than requiring each workstation to install custom connectors. Exchange is like a SUV - it's big, it eats resources, and it's likely to fall over at any time (SUVs are very likely to roll over in a sharp turn) but it's what everyone wants because of successful marketing. It's no good saying the vehicle you offer does the job far better if everyone wants a SUV.

We know it used to use qmail before the takeover. We know Bill has at least twice tried (and failed) to switch it to Exchange. The MTA doesn't explicitly identify itself, and it does not show some of the subtler signatures of qmail either. It's hard to tell what it is. Could be a modified qmail, or Exchange with the identifiers filed off, or Postfix with the identifiers filed off, or... The point was that if Hotmail is running Exchange, or ever manages to do so, the per-seat licence costs would make their service uneconomic if it weren't for the fact they'll get a special deal.

Which will only happen if there is sufficient demand for it to make it wortwhile. Even if you're rich and don't have to work for a living you're unlikely to devote effort to something that almost nobody uses. And if nobody is working on it, even fewer people will use it as time goes by, so it's a vicious circle.