Sysadmins who's orgs use email services other than Gsuite or Exchange (365 included). What u you use any why?

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Que_Ball@reddit

Zoho has a decent alternative package. Zoho workplace professional.

I have one client using it. They have mostly retail storefronts and it has been good. They originally started with their free offering back when it was 25 users but have upgraded to paid plan. Very similar to Google workspace. Web interface for everyone we do not attempt to mess with outlook or imap clients. We deploy the PWA web app for the mail and it is honestly good.

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BoomSchtik@reddit

Go with Zoho if you enjoy incompetent off shored support.

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first_lvr@reddit

+1

Super good on small/medium groups, my friend who deploy web pages has several customers with zoho, they do work fine

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mpking828@reddit

Ditto. One small 5 user client. Works great.

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david-yammer-murdoch@reddit

Zoho great, with all the other tools.

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BoomSchtik@reddit

don't say GoDaddy.... don't say GoDaddy

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Ondo_Sun@reddit

Worked with a business that managed a large body of consultants(2000+). They used https://mdaemon.com/pages/mdaemon-email-server

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signed-@reddit

There very likely arent, apart maybee for Zimbra

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Amnesiaphant@reddit

i work as a system engineer for a educational facility and we use Zimbra Mail Server as the backbone for the Outlook app on our Clients... It's a mess and i would've switched over to ms365 or Exchange in a second but sadly we've got no budget and the higher up guy is a huge FOSS and Linux fan who will rather die than switch over to big bad MS.

the amount of money we've spent on supporting that mixed setup could've paid off MS Enterprise Licenses + VM Server Hardware and migration costs

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rainer_d@reddit

I guess the problem is Outlook. The web client works well enough.

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Amnesiaphant@reddit

Yes it does, for IT people. For people who are more comfortable with Outlook and MS Stuff, it really doesn't. FOSS has it's place, but not in the corporate world imo.

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SlateRaven@reddit

Microsoft M365 licensing for education is dirt cheap - there's no reason to not use it if you're EDU! For example, we get A5 licensing for roughly $90/user/year (faculty/staff), student accounts are free. I think A3 was closer to $70/user/year.

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fshannon3@reddit

I worked at a Healthcare insurance/software provider about 15 years ago that used Zimbra. Smallish, local company with a nationwide presence.

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anothercopy@reddit

Oracle used Zimbra many years ago Not sure about now

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Staticip_it@reddit

Last org I was with went from g-suite to 365. Was also curious about this.

Personally I use proton for email, I do believe they have a business option that has similar features to the previously mentioned but isn’t a 1-1 replacement.

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FireLucid@reddit

Last org I was with went from g-suite to 365.

We are doing that 'sometime, maybe next year'. I am pushing for in the next 6 months. How was the migration (mail and calendars)?

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Staticip_it@reddit

Honestly it was pretty painless. Only real stress was waiting for the CEO’s email of over 55gb to sync and having to figure out Microsoft’s licensing structure.

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Mundane-Penalty9596@reddit

Lotus Notes is still around. I think it’s called HCL Notes.

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topane@reddit

Another Notes/Domino admin checking in. There are dozens of us!

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Delta31_Heavy@reddit

At least dozens! I can still hear that support music when you called IBM a really great guitar player. Seriously I made a career on Domino and Lotus and my last touch of it was 9.01

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iareagenius@reddit

Oh God, I wish you hadn't told me this, I'm getting PTSD from when we used to use that horrendous software

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vNerdNeck@reddit

Really? I always loved lotus. Searches actually worked. They had email functionality that to this day no one else has (like the little circle that you could tell if an email was to you, or if you were CC'ed without even opening it open..

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int0h@reddit

Did you ever administer lotus notes/domino?

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Delta31_Heavy@reddit

I have Ask me anything

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vNerdNeck@reddit

No. And I would probably have different feelings about it. Luckily I was able to avoid any mailing technical support through our my career. Was never something I want to deal with.

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darthcaedus81@reddit

On the Domino side, individual databases for each mail file or application was so much nicer to work with than local PST files and giant Exchange databases

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Efficient_Reading360@reddit

And upgrading a Domino cluster was actually sensible from an admin perspective (upgrade each node in turn, they participate in the cluster in backwards compatibility mode until all nodes are running latest version).

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darthcaedus81@reddit

Used to sit and do it from home of an evening as confidence levels were so good that it would just work.

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Stephen_Dann@reddit

Good Exchange management and proper retention and archive policies shouldn't require PST files. Always considered them a lazy way of managing that lead to long term issues with storage and compliance

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darthcaedus81@reddit

Thankfully I only have to deal with it rarely and from an end user POV now. Send the actual users off to the help desk, network is up, so not my circus these days.

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Delta31_Heavy@reddit

I’m an old time Domino admin. Lotus Domino to this day still beats Exchange hands down as a email system. End to end encryption. Has never been hacked. Easy to setup and administer. Running command line…I can go on

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Smoking-Posing@reddit

Ditto

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720hp@reddit

My mind raced through its disaster mode seeing Lotus Notes

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steavor@reddit

Funny how most replies actually reminisce in a positive way.

And indeed it has a lot of points going for it: - integrated PKI - sending E2E encrypted emails to a coworker takes no effort at all - excellent replication functionality - it is actually not an email server - but a low barrier software development solution.

I've got no idea why Lotus led with "email" as the leading application / use case for their product as arguably their approach to ACLs made this one of the most arcane workflows under the hood.

On the plus side, if you do use both the custom application and the email portion their integration is great - just send a link to an application document in your email, or a link to an email in your application. Easy way to automatically categorize (and keep track of paying) invoices you receive by mail, for example.

Obviously, you can support any use case without Domino / Notes - you use APIs for that. The beauty of Domino is that it is all inside the same software, you don't need any APIs, and if you want to redesign your mailbox to show an arcane attribute as a column (or group by it?) you aren't stuck with what Microsoft allows you to select in Outlook but you can even program it yourself (if permissions have been granted for you to do so)

Again on the other hand, having everything done in one monolithic software means none of it really excels.

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Pulse54@reddit

HCL Domino/Notes admin here.

~2800 users Admin server Internal routing server 5 server mail cluster 2 web servers 2 app servers 2 disaster recovery servers 2 mail archive servers storing 24 TB, messages back to '97 Sametime meeting/chat server

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ErikTheEngineer@reddit

Place I worked at last had Notes forever...and still had it but had migrated email/calendaring/chat to 365 at least. How have things been since IBM dumped it? When I saw it was being sold to an offshore bodyshop, my mind immediately jumped to how awful the support/release process would become?

For companies that really went all-in on developing custom applications for it, Notes is hard to get rid of. Very few tools work the way it does.

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Pulse54@reddit

HCL honestly has impressed me. I usually receive a phone call in under 2 hrs for support. Their release schedule adding new features/fixes has kept me busy enough. We have several custom applications.

C-suite has asked us several times about moving to 365 but when we show them the cost to migrate with loss of existing functionality they leave us alone for a few years.

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xendr0me@reddit

Do you even sleep at night?

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Pulse54@reddit

Yes very well!

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RedDidItAndYouKnowIt@reddit

Look. Nobody needs to sleep if they're busy working.

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hceuterpe@reddit

Ah , HCL--the place where obsolete software goes to die. It's basically the software hospice company.

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ErikTheEngineer@reddit

Don't forget Open Text and the ghosts of CA and Symantec inside Broadcom. Or whoever owns WordPerfect now...I swear they must only have a handful of law firms who refuse to switch actually buying it at this point.

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MrVantage@reddit

Last job we used this still!

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NumerousYak3652@reddit

I joined an Org using HCL notes and the search was a damn joke 🤣. I just resigned myself to knowing after a few weeks I was never going to find an email ever again.

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robbgg@reddit (OP)

Outlook is pretty bad as well.

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tapwater86@reddit

Migrating one of the 17 companies still on it to M365 next week.

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darthcaedus81@reddit

I miss Domino and Notes too this day. Been about 5 years since it got migrated to M365 / I left the org.

I know it gets a lot of hate but I genuinely loved it and there are still things I miss features wise.

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timsstuff@reddit

Damn one of my first migrations was from Lotus Notes to O365, around 2014. We ended up using Quest's Lotus Notes to Exchange migration tool and it actually worked really well.

The biggest problem was recurring meetings that had exceptions, where they moved one to a different time or something. Solution was to have the meeting organizer update the meeting after it was migrated to re-send it to attendees.

For mail routing I added a sub-domain to Notes and set users who hadn't migrated yet as Mail Users with a target address of the Note sub-domain, and for O365 users I added them as contacts in Notes with their onmicrosoft.com address.

Worked fine. Except the client wanted me to provide documentation on how to use Outlook. No joke. Like "how do I compose an email". I sent them a link to some Microsoft tutorials lol.

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networkthinking@reddit

Whoa that was news to me. I used to use Notes and also manage it. Pretty cool

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Vogete@reddit

We used to run our self developed system that we also resell as a product. Then someone decided it's best we pay Microsoft instead of keep using the product we're developing anyway. Oh well.

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aWilly-@reddit

we migrated over from ice warp to 365

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fadingcross@reddit

Don't work there any ore, but my previous job was extremely high security. We used postfix, dovecot and Thunderbird for about 900 users.

There were extreme limits on what software was allowed to be bought. Most was FOSS or in house developed.

It was fantastic.

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ErikTheEngineer@reddit

One thing I wonder is how many boxes are being checked in these environments with AWS GovCloud and Azure GCC High. Seems to me there will be a lot of migrations that way if the regulatory hoops can be jumped through, especially with the new US administration coming in with an eye to privatizing everything. I guess some things will always be airgapped though, but it'll probably fall back to just the spy agencies (CIA/NSA/NRO) and the inner sanctum of the armed services.

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fadingcross@reddit

It was considered and thrown out almost immediately. I don't think you really grasp how many inside Azure and AWS that have access to those environments.

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ErikTheEngineer@reddit

I don't think you really grasp how many inside Azure and AWS that have access to those environments.

Oh, I guarantee the compliance is just checkbox compliance, maybe they have the stuff in another rack and only allow US citizens who've done a basic background check to work on it. There's no way they're going to pay for fully cleared individuals to administer an Azure scale unit or keep things totally separate. But that's not going to stop some federal agency CIO, especially in this new executive branch, from getting sold the promise. Core stuff will continue to be run internally but unclassified stuff is probably fair game.

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outofspaceandtime@reddit

There’s some movement in Europe around the Sovereign Workplace / OpenDesk initiative. The email platform in use there is Open Xchange. Looks promising, but I don’t have any hands on experience yet with it.

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michael_sage@reddit

Have a few mailenable servers still out in the wild!

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godsey786@reddit

Zoho Workplace Offers a comprehensive suite including email, cloud storage, video meetings, and office apps at a lower price point than G Suite or Microsoft 365

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ITrCool@reddit

Place I worked for a while back used Groupwise. It was Novell's product at the time, but now Open Text owns it, after the MicroFocus buyout:

GroupWise Team Collaboration Software | OpenText

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pw_strain@reddit

So many Groupwise migrations… I wonder how many are licensed for it now.

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ITrCool@reddit

I'm honestly curious too.

The nice thing about GroupWise was it's power as an on-prem email platform. If you weren't sending off-site to anyone, that email was LIGHTNING fast. Same with the calendar function! You'd see changes in real time when someone else made a change. It was glorious.

We eventually migrated to Exchange Online and Outlook 2010 about two years before I left.

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techvet83@reddit

Message recall really worked.

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ITrCool@reddit

Yeeeees!!

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InevitableOk5017@reddit

If have to too what you u use?

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L3TH3RGY@reddit

Installed mdaemon for a client. It's not too bad but not my go to. I'm an exchange guy 😁

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ompster@reddit

Mdaemon is fine once it's setup properly, including all the domain stuff like SPF, dkim etc

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mahsab@reddit

Mdaemon is great. Been using it for 25 years without issues. Has everything.

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Admirable-Fail1250@reddit

I'm contemplating switching from exchange to mdaemon. Depends on the price of Exchange when the time comes.

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jtbis@reddit

I worked at an org that was using Kerio Connect. They were pushing 1500 users at the time and it was well beyond what the software could handle. We were running into bugs and performance issues all the time. Support even told me we were their biggest customer.

I ultimately convinced them to switch to M365. We basically scripted the whole migration in-house because none of the big Microsoft partners knew what Kerio was.

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mwdmeyer@reddit

I loved Kerio Connect (even ran it personally back in 2003) before they got purchased by GFI (who completely ran the products into the ground). It was great for small companies up to 40-50 people.

Now days I'd never run anything other than 365, even for a single user, but I much preferred maintaining a Kerio Connect box (and upgading it) over the various Exchange 2003, 2007, SBS boxes we had.

Glad it isn't really a decision that needs to be made anymore.

I've still got a VM shutdown somewhere with an old Kerio Connect 9 install on Debian....

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dartdoug@reddit

I'm surprised not to see anyone posting about using Rackspace for email.

We had dozens of customers on their email platform for many years. It was economical and worked reasonably well. But they didn't keep up feature wise and their support went from "Fanatical" as they used to say to absolute trash.

Then their Hosted Exchange platform was compromised and they decided not to resurrect those servers. But AFAIK their POP/IMAP platform still exists.

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jerrystrieff@reddit

I use to run an 8000 user Sendmail server on Solaris

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punkwalrus@reddit

Ugh, former job used CommuniGate. It couldn't handle the incoming spam, so we had a fleet of 6 tagging servers running exim, Spamassassin, and clamav, and it wasn't enough. We received over 3 million emails a month, 98.7% of them were spam or viruses. That was just under 40,000 emails a month that were legit over 3000 client email addresses. We ended up buying two Ironport servers (now Cisco) at $100k each just to handle mail.

Spam is bad, folks.

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Dangerousfish@reddit

I use AWS SES for outbound & I'm aware AWS Workmail is a think for inbound too..

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NowThatHappened@reddit

GEN for email and filtering, nextcloud for office and do/ibm for cloud (mostly) but we’re Mac / Linux.

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bryiewes@reddit

How cost effective is Mac + Linux compared to solely Windows?

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NowThatHappened@reddit

Well, it’s free, so that much cheaper.

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bryiewes@reddit

But I'm also thinking on a hardware scale. How does the cost of a mac compare to a windows machine + license

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NowThatHappened@reddit

Well, the apple hardware is more expensive but it lasts much longer and it’s more productive. The Linux hardware is exactly the same if not cheaper because we can get a lot more out of even low power pcs.

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bryiewes@reddit

Thanks for answering

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archiekane@reddit

CALs are a shit ton cheaper, for sure.

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josemcornynetoperek@reddit

Only own mail server. Just postfix, dovecot and rspamd.

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giacomok@reddit

We had a potential client who is doing most of his business with China, who wanted to use Tencent Cloud instead of MS365.

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GgSgt@reddit

They might as well just package all their IP into a nice zip and send that right on over to the CCP. They would appreciate the assist.

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corruptboomerang@reddit

What, like MS & Google doesn't have an open door policy with the US Government?

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DeadOnToilet@reddit

Awwww you think the US isn't doing the same thing? That's precious. I wish I lived in your little land of make-believe.

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giacomok@reddit

You can be assured that the CCP already appreciates his assist in various ways with him doing so much business in china. 🙃

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Inside_Sheepherder87@reddit

Inherited some clients on Intermedia and IceWarp. Intermedia is Exchange Online 2016 and is a bit dated. IceWarp is just strange. Have to use their special connector to access email in Outlook. All the clients will be moving to MS365 or Gmail. Two less portals to manage.

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Stonewalled9999@reddit

I have a client with 5 Yahoo accounts. They would bet better with pretty much anything else even webmail from their website host !

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Neratyr@reddit

i use proton for business across my orgs. the companies are mine and not huge. Even if i were to scale them alot I would still stick with proton for business

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uninspired@reddit

What do you use for mail clients? Honestly until I poked through this thread I haven't thought much about it since larger orgs tend to just use MS or Google. I have not even considered what I'd do with a SMB

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Neratyr@reddit

i have the proton for business suite, so each user is entitled to the 'proton mail' app available on all major desktop OS as well as IOS / Android, and finally web. You can also connect other clients too if you wanted!

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crnkymvmt@reddit

My side project I run with about 8 people uses Fastmail - in almost 10 years theyve made nothing but quality of life improvements and done exactly 1 major UI change. The costs are reasonable to use your own domain and the basic management features are there.

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