Help me avoid Exchange

[Ben Scott]

On 12/29/05, Thomas Charron <twaffle at gmail.com> wrote:
>> g) If the load issue is enough to justify a separate Exchange server,
>> then add another Windows Server licensing cost.
>
>   Unless, of course, someone has an MSDN subscription..

  I'm not sure, but I think the MSDN license does not permit
production use of server products.

>> h) Depending on the version of Exchange, the default for converting MAPI
>> messages to MIME format is HTML. While this can be changed on a
>> user-by-user basis, if your clients don't do HTML, then they won't be
>> able to read MAPI messages.
>
>   ....  *blink*  I missed some contextual data here.  If you're using IMAP
> and SMTP, what's MAPI have to do with anything?

  The term "MAPI" is heavily overloaded.  There are two client APIs
called "MAPI", there's the so-called "MAPI wire protocol" used to
communicate between Exchange and Outlook, and there's the message
format called "MAPI".  I believe the OP is talking about the last one.
 Say you've got a big group of Outlook users with a huge store of
messages.  Many, if not most, of those messages will be in MAPI
format.   (In Exchange 5.5, they all were.)  If an IMAP or POP client
connects to Exchange, Exchange converts the MAPI messages  into MIME
format on-the-fly.  With Exchange 2000/2003, the MIME version also
gets stored into the "streaming" (STM) side of the Information Store
(MAPI items live in the EDB side of the IS).

  Which actually raises a point I forgot: if you have a large
mixed-client base sharing many messages, your disk space usage for
Exchange can increase dramatically, as Exchange ends up keeping two
copies of every message (one MAPI, one MIME).  I doubt Paul's company
is going to see an en masse migration to IMAP, though, so this is more
of a theoretical point.

> You can configure exchange
> to do pretty much whatever you want with em anyway..

  If you can only figure out *how*... ;-)

>  If they already paid 100k for a god damned bus, 'becouse that bus cost too
> much' isn't going to fly..  ;-)

  Buses don't normally fly anyway.  ;-)

-- Ben