I have never liked the Exchange mail server. I learned email servers from one of the originators of Sendmail. Sendmail has it's problems. I enjoyed Qmail. I even enjoyed Postfix, I have generally enjoyed most unix based mail servers because although confusing to some, the puzzle pieces make sense in my mind.
But Exchange is a different beast.
I've been doing this job for nearly 5 years now and in that time I have upgraded Exchange 3 times.
EACH time I have become convinced that the newer version is WORSE than the previous.
Exchange 2010 is losing it's GUI-ness and going more command line. So, it was with the experience of knowing that moving to Exchange 2007 with 2003 was wrought with bugs and problems, that we very carefully went to 2010.
While the gui on 2010 looks very similiar, the under workings are very different and so when someone from the helpdesk came to me and said,
"our imap clients can't send email" I thought 'it's probably some super secret hidden command line somewhere that says 'make sending mail work for Imap clients'.
After hours of experimentation and searching, I found it. YUP... there's a super secret command line for imap clients only, to be able to send mail.
THANKS Microsoft. I really needed to waste 5 hours of my life. Why wasn't that in the training I took? Why wasn't it in the documentation? Why wasn't it in the gui? What were you thinking?
I know what they were thinking. See this super secret command line isn't needed if you're running microsoft products only. But we support Mac's and Linux boxes which run non-microsoft email clients. And so they use imap, and so, it didn't work. Outlook in imap mode works great.
Our department may quickly be switching away from microsoft products simply because of the cost involved. I'm looking forward to that day. If you want, you can pray that God sends us the right staff who understand unix enough to be able to maintain unix servers.
