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We are at the verge of a mail server decision. We do currently use 2 mail servers : MDaemon 10 and Exchange 2003. We are planning to use a company and customer wide one point solution. Our candidates are MDaemon 11 and Exchange 2007 or 2010. We would like to learn other users experiences on those solutions. The server-side experiences, the user-side experiences, system loads, feature set, TCO, support options etc. And if there are other solutions (like MDaemon 11 + Exchange or anything else) what would you suggest ?

Edit : I would like to give our mail account numbers. We maintain nearly 40.000 customer accounts (which grows nearly by 2.000 accounts per year) and over 60 employee or system accounts. Exchange is responsible only for inhouse e-mail traffic. MDaemon is responsible for the customer accounts and is being used as a gateway for Exchange.

Montag451
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It depends. For you as business? For customers?

Alternatives : SMarterTools SmarterMail - offers a lot what exchange does incl. their great calendaring functionality with synchronization to mobile phones.

Anyhow, email only - exchange is EXPENSIVE.

Company platform - exchange has FEATURES. A lot of them (including the ability to dil in by phone and change appointments with voice commands etc. - many things that may make sense in organizations for their internal stuff.

As such, the comparison is not fair in any direction unless you know whether you go for email only.

TomTom
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I like Exchange, but this is in environments where a large part of the features get used and Exchange is integrated into MS Office on the desktop, sharepoint, etc. If all you're going to do is email then you're going to be spending a lot of money on things that not only will not get used but which will have the potential to get in the way when troubleshooting issues.

Current impressions: Currently supporting exchange 2007 for a few thousand users in an educational environment - 2 server config, one hosting all the databases and one handling client connections, including mobile phone support.

It's reliable by however you want to measure it: It hasn't crashed - ever. It hasn't lost email. It hasn't done anything stupid to someone's account settings. It's available to our users all the time except for when we schedule an outage and take it offline ourselves.

Performance is more than adequate: We don't notice any issues configuring and supporting it (It does like to quickly consume all the resources you allow it to, but having done so it will sit there quite happily making use of what it has for months on end until we reboot for patching; and most importantly we don't have any user complaints about performance.

Rob Moir
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Exchange 2010 rocks. In that past I might have said to keep Mdaemon as a gateway and use exchange but I stopped using postfix as my default gateway with 2010 upgrades and haven't looked back. It just works, and since it uses a local adam instance for account verification (as 2007 edge servers did) there are less ports to open

Jim B
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  • Since when are you using Exchange 2010 ? What are your system loads ? (eg. user account numbers, e-mail traffic bandwidth, spam filtering loads etc.) Have you ever had serious problems and how fast and efficiently could you solve them ? I have many questions. Is it ok if I bombard you with them :) – Montag451 May 18 '10 at 12:30
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    yes you can ask me with questions. On the most recent upgrade they have approx 10k users across a redundant exchange cluster. I can dig up bandwidth stats later today ( I think). Exchange 2010 solved a problem they were having with spam filtering. Originally they were going to use EX2007 as an edge server with trend micro. That system quickly got overwhelmed so they went with a simple linux gateway and did minimal antispam there (but it let the messages queue) tried again with ex2010 - no more connection refused issues and lower bandwdith usage. Upgrade completed 12/20/09 - no problems – Jim B May 18 '10 at 13:09
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    For another world wide customer the rollout is 90% complete (started in , 12 exchange servers supporting 4000 employees and about 15K mailboxes) I don't have bandwidth usage (at least not for just email) Barracuda spam gagteway for edge device and exchange the rest of the way in. No issues so far some minor problem with mobile device sync that seem to all be device related. – Jim B May 18 '10 at 15:35