Download Deploying DNS and Sendmail

Other Options: Proprietary
• Expensive to acquire
• Administrator intensive
• Difficult to scale
– Server intensive
– Binary formats consume more bandwidth/disk
• Need extra gateway for SMTP mail
Many sites have one or more communities of users that read email with proprietary
email systems such as Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes. While such systems
may have more integrated "groupware" type functionality, they also come with a
host of problems that aren't present in standards-based email systems.
First and foremost, these proprietary systems usually cost a lot of money. Aside
from the basic software cost, many organizations end up spending a lot of money on
consulting help to get the systems installed properly. The systems also tend to
require many more administrators per user as compared to standards-based systems.
Being monolithic, "closed" applications, there really is no good way to scale these
products other than buying bigger servers-- something which rapidly reaches a point
of diminishing marginal returns. Because users are used to shipping Word
documents and other binary formats around as email messages, more network
bandwidth and disk space are consumed.
Also note that when these organizations wish to send email via the Internet, SMTP
functionality is usually an add-on product (and often extremely buggy). Also, these
users will tend to continue to send Word documents as email messages, even though
the recipients (often members of your own company) will be unable to read them,
being Unix text mail users.
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