Zimbra Anticipation and Exchange Hatred
I have mentioned it in passing before, but almost every server associated with our company is running Linux (and Mac has managed to take over the workstations surprisingly fast - only 2 windows machines being used now). The last hold out on the server side was the Exchange server we setup when we first got an office that for obvious reasons had to be running Windows Server 2003. This was the same server I had the raid fun with.
Finally, after a year+ now of me hating Exchange solo, the requests and general feeling of the office has shifted against it across development AND sales and the migration to Zimbra is scheduled to be completed next week. I couldn’t be happier about it. Among many things I am most looking forward to administering a Linux machine, having a better web client (that doesn’t change by browser), and Apple iSync support. I am also looking forward to the Blackberry support which despite my unwanted but nontrivial experience with Windows servers I absolutely could not make work with Exchange.
To properly send Exchange on its way I thought I would enumerate some of the many reasons I hate it 
- It runs on Windows. Windows is decent for a workstation but makes for an awful server in my opinion. Perhaps it comes down to experience, but I feel that the Windows approach to server administration (meaning hundreds of obscure windows, tabs, and buttons) requires more effort to learn, involves completely unnecessary abstractions over known technology, and makes everything you need to do take longer. They are unstable, require reboots to update (wtf?), and you have to use remote desktop to administer them. Enough about Windows as a server in general, back to Exchange.
- There is no reasonable method for setting up a catch all. Read this page if you need to do it and prepare to be disgusted.
- There is no reasonable method for forwarding email. How did they mess this one up so badly? It seems that the ability to setup an email forward would be a core feature of server software designed to send and receive email. To do this you have to create a dummy contact with the forward email, then create an exchange user account (with a different name and username else there is a collision), then configure that exchange user account to forward its mail to the dummy contact record, which will then cause the email to be forwarded to the final destination. Completely ridiculous as it bloats the active directory listing with loads of dead entries and takes too many steps to setup.
- I have had a lot of trouble with Exchange’s SMTP connectors where HTML emails headed towards external email accounts (via forwarding hack mentioned in previous bullet) back up in the queues for absolutely no reason and prevent messages from being delivered for hours sometimes.
- It doesn’t support iSync as far as I know.
- It doesn’t have spam filtering built in (it kind of does but it does an awful job in our experience).
- The web client is pretty terrible, and if you try to access it with anything other than IE is takes a severe dive to awful. In the non-IE mode you can’t search, can’t create folders, can’t create rules, and it is genuinely unusable.
The only big strength Exchange offered, and the reason we used it to begin with, was the calendar synchronization and thankfully Zimbra has arrived to offer an alternative to the mess that is Exchange. Zimbra is now feature rich, stable, and validated by huge installations such as the one at Georgia Tech. The feedback and reviews are glowing and the documentation makes it clear that all the little things I hate about Exchange because they take too long or are too cludgy are quick command line or file editing steps.
I’ll post again once I have put some hours of usage in with some content that doesn’t mention Exchange once and instead talks about Zimbra. I think it is safe to say though that if you are starting a company just skip Exchange from the start. You can get hosted Zimbra just as you can hosted Exchange if you don’t want to manage your own server.