Bonum Certa Men Certa

Why and How Microsoft Exchange Should be Replaced by Free/Libre Software

Euro



Summary: The exchange rates are good for swapping Microsoft Exchange with something that actually works and is reliable, not just less expensive

A

T A LATER stage this week we'll show that Gates' investment arm has just expanded to England with a new office in London. But that's not the subject of this post, which was sent to us by an anonymous reader.



According to this press release, "ENow Presents at Microsoft UK Headquarters" (more on Exchange lock-in). For those who ever consider building a mail infrastructure with Exchange (which is a lot of trouble not just for administrators [1, 2]), here are the words from someone with a long and painful experience:

MS Exchange keeps breaking, Apple, Android and everyone else take one for the team and take the blame: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3398

All the discussion is about portable devices "not working" even though it is MS Exchange that quits. They should all just get over it, that's what MS Exchange does, it breaks. Eventually they should just learn to shut up and take what Bill has to give them, either by getting used to the fact that they will never get much done tethered to Bill's Exchange, or by being harassed and brow beat by the Microsoft Insiders for 'making them look bad'

http://www.kolab.org/ http://www.citadel.org/ http://www.opengroupware.org/

The late, great Zimbra should also get a mention because it is now part of Microsoft's Yahoo. Ostensibly one of the goals of the hostile take over was to crush Free and Open Source Software developer teams like the one on Zimbra.

There are also calendar servers which integrate well with other systems. Any web designer worth his coffee grounds can hook them together with the mail service:

http://www.bedework.org/ http://andrew.triumf.ca/dingo http://trac.calendarserver.org/

If plain old mail is what you need, then look no further than these:

http://www.dovecot.org/ http://www.postfix.org/ http://www.exim.org/

If lusers miss some of the traditional features of MS Exchange such as downtime, unreliable connections, lost mail and delayed mail, there are many work-arounds.

* Downtime can be simulated by blocking the mail ports with the firewall for a few minutes every hours. MS Exchange monkeys usually have the Windows box underneath reboot every hour, to help hid instability this takes ten minutes or so each hour.

* Unreliable connections can be simulated by having the firewall drop random packets to or from the mail service. Be sure to just drop the packets, a return will send an icmp message to let the client know and that would not be as slow.

* Lost mail can be configured into the spam filter. Just have it delete 10% - 33% of incoming and outgoing mail. 10% used to be the industry average for MS Exchange but in many deployments that loss has been improved to 20% or even 30%!

* Delayed mail can also be simulated by the firewall or by the spam filter. Just bounce the message back using the spam filter or use the firewall to temporarily block incoming messages.

That way even if you use functional software and leave MS behind, you can still experience the chaos and accusations found in MS shops. A cold-turkey move might be too much for some fragile minds and an occasional round of "didn't you get the memo?" ought to keep them in familiar territory during the phaseout.


This is coming from someone with first-hand experience. The main reason some people choose Exchange is that they are stuck in a mentality where everything is Windows. Later on we'll write about the role of schools in this troubling mentality.

Comments

Recent Techrights' Posts

Let's Hope GNU Makes it to 100
Can GNU still be in active use in 2083? Maybe.
GNU is 40, Linux is Just 32
Today it's exactly 40 years since Richard Stallman sent a message regarding GNU
GNU/Linux and Free Software News Mostly in Tux Machines Now
We've split the coverage
Links 27/09/2023: GNOME Raves and Firefox 118
Links for the day
Links 27/09/2023: 3G Phase-Out, Monopolies, and Exit of Rupert Murdoch
Links for the day
IBM Took a Man’s Voice, Pitting Him Against His Own Work, While Companies Profit from Low-Effort Garbage Generated by Bots and “Self-Service”
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Links 26/09/2023: KDE, Programming, and More
Links for the day
Mozilla Promotes the Closed Web and Proprietary Webapps That Are Security and Privacy Hazards
This is just another reminder that the people who run Mozilla don't know the history of Firefox, don't understand the Web, and are beholden to "GAFAM", not to Firefox users
Debian More Like an Exploitative Sweatshop Than a Family
Wiltshire is riding a high horse in the UK, talking down to Indians who are "low-level" volunteers in his kingdom of authoritarians, guarded by an army of British lawyers who bully bloggers
Small Computers in Large Numbers: A Pipeline of Open Hardware
They guard and prioritise their "premiums", causing severe price hikes due to supply/demand disparities.
Microsoft Deserves a Medal for Being Worst at Security (the Media Deserves a Medal for Cover-up)
There are still corruptible/bribed publishers that quote Microsoft staff like they're security gurus
Real Life Should be Offline, Not Online, and It Requires Free Software
Resistance means having the guts to say "no!", even in the face of great societal burden and peer pressure
10 Reasons to Permanently Export or Liberate Your Site From WordPress, Drupal, and Other Bloatware
There are certainly more more advantages, but 10 should suffice for now
About 200,000 Objects in Techrights Web Site
This hopefully helps demonstrate just how colossal the migration actually is
Good Teachers Would Tell Kids to Quit Social Control Media Rather Than Participate in It (Teaching Means Education, Not Misinformation)
Insist that classrooms offer education to children rather than offer children to corporations
Twitter: From Walled Gardens to Paywalls and/or Amplifiers of Fascism
There's moreover a push to promote politicians who are as scummy as Twitter's owner
The World Wide Web is Being Confiscated From Us (Like Syndication Was Withdrawn About a Decade Ago) and We Need to Fight Back
We're worse off when fewer people promote RSS feeds and instead outsource to social control media (censorship, surveillance, manipulation)
Next Up: Restoring IRC Log Pipelines, Bulletins/Full Text RSS, Wiki (Archived, Static), and Pipelines for Daily Links
There are still many tasks left ahead of us, but we've progressed a lot
An Era of Rotting Technology, Migration Crises, and Cliffhanging
We've covered examples from IBM, resembling the Microsoft world
First Iteration of Techrights as 100% Static Pages Web Site
We want to champion another decade or two of positive impact and opinionated analysis
Links 25/09/2023: Patent News and Coding
some remaining links for today
Steam Deck is Mostly Good in the Sense That It Weakens Microsoft's Dominance (Windows)
The Steam Deck is mostly a DRM appliance
SUSE is Just Another Black Cat Working for Proprietary Giants/Monopolies
SUSE's relationship with firms such as these generally means that SUSE works for authority, not for community, and when it comes to cryptography it just follows guidelines from the US government
IBM is Selling Complexity, Not GNU/Linux
It's not about the clients, it's about money
Birthday of Techrights in 6 Weeks (Tux Machines and Techrights Reach Combined Age of 40 in 2025)
We've already begun the migration to static
Linux Foundation: We Came, We Saw, We Plundered
Linux Foundation staff uses neither Linux nor Open Source. They're essentially using, exploiting, piggybacking goodwill gestures (altruism of volunteers) while paying themselves 6-figure salaries.
Security Isn't the Goal of Today's Software and Hardware Products
Any newly-added layer represents more attack surface
Linux Too Big to Be Properly Maintained When There's an Incentive to Sell More and More Things (Complexity and Narrow Support Window)
They want your money, not your peace of mind. That's a problem.
Modern Web Means Proprietary Trash
Mozilla is financially beholden to Google and thus we cannot expect any pushback or for Firefox to "reclaims the Web" a second time around
Godot 4.2 is Approaching, But After What Happened to Unity All Game Developers Should be Careful
We hope Unity will burn in a massive fire and, as for Godot, we hope it'll get rid of Microsoft
GNU/Linux Has Conquered the World, But Users' Freedom Has Not (Impediments Remain in Hardware)
Installing one's system of choice on a device is very hard, sometimes impossible
Another Copyright Lawsuit Against Microsoft (or its Proxy) for Misuse of Large Works by Chatbot
Some people mocked us for saying this day would come; chatbots are a huge disappointment and they're on very shaky legal ground
Privacy is Not a Crime, Reporting Hidden Facts Is Not a Crime Either
the powerful companies/governments/societies get to know everything about everybody, but if anyone out there discovers or shares dark secrets about those powerful companies/governments/societies, that's a "crime"
United Workforce Always Better for the Workers
In the case of technology, it is possible that a lack of collective action is because of relatively high salaries and less physically-demanding jobs
Purge of Software Freedom and Its Voices
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
GNOME and GTK Taking Freedom Away From Users
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer