decoration decoration
Stories

GROKLAW
When you want to know more...
decoration
For layout only
Home
Archives
Site Map
Search
About Groklaw
Awards
Legal Research
Timelines
ApplevSamsung
ApplevSamsung p.2
ArchiveExplorer
Autozone
Bilski
Cases
Cast: Lawyers
Comes v. MS
Contracts/Documents
Courts
DRM
Gordon v MS
GPL
Grokdoc
HTML How To
IPI v RH
IV v. Google
Legal Docs
Lodsys
MS Litigations
MSvB&N
News Picks
Novell v. MS
Novell-MS Deal
ODF/OOXML
OOXML Appeals
OraclevGoogle
Patents
ProjectMonterey
Psystar
Quote Database
Red Hat v SCO
Salus Book
SCEA v Hotz
SCO Appeals
SCO Bankruptcy
SCO Financials
SCO Overview
SCO v IBM
SCO v Novell
SCO:Soup2Nuts
SCOsource
Sean Daly
Software Patents
Switch to Linux
Transcripts
Unix Books

Gear

Groklaw Gear

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.


You won't find me on Facebook


Donate

Donate Paypal


No Legal Advice

The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

Here's Groklaw's comments policy.


What's New

STORIES
No new stories

COMMENTS last 48 hrs
No new comments


Sponsors

Hosting:
hosted by ibiblio

On servers donated to ibiblio by AMD.

Webmaster
Help! - Anyone got a link to an article about Microsoft using Linux for their email? | 237 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Help! - Anyone got a link to an article about Microsoft using Linux for their email?
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 21 2012 @ 04:48 AM EDT

I know that hotmail used to be run on FreeBSD machines... Is that what you were
looking for?

Wikipedia has a mention of it, and Google shows lots of results. Here's the
Wikipedia quote:

"Hotmail initially ran under Solaris for mail services and Apache on
FreeBSD for web services before being converted to Microsoft products."


I do remember MS catching a lot of flack about this, and it took several
attempts to switch everything away from the BSDs (if they really have, anyway.
I seem to remember something about them claiming to have replaced the FreeBSD
systems with their stuff, and I think it was someone in the FreeBSD mailing
lists who made a point to prove that "beastie" was still there behind
the scenes :) )

Those were the fun days. :)

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Help! - Anyone got a link to an article about Microsoft using Linux for their email?
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 21 2012 @ 05:32 AM EDT
I know people working at UoA who use Thunderbird on MacOS,
but there was a problem with certificate acceptance on Fedora.
I didn't hear how/if that got solved, it's a year since I left that job.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Help! - Anyone got a link to an article about Microsoft using Linux for their email?
Authored by: mschmitz on Sunday, April 22 2012 @ 06:12 PM EDT
If it helps - MS did use BSD mail servers in the past. What you're faced with is
not the 'mail server' you think you are - the BSD mail servers MS used were the
mail relays sending, accepting and forwarding mail.

Your problem is the mail presentation back end which UoA decided to migrate to
Exchange a few years back. (I started using postbox, a Horde IMAP back end, that
was actually running on Linux. The server was aging rapidly and not replaced).

The decision to switch to Exchange was made at a level not accessible to regular
users, and I'm sure it was informed by considerations on how to integrate e-mail
into the entire office workflow. I'm awfully sorry to say Linux solutions don't
do so well in that area. Correct me if I'm wrong there.

UoA Exchange does interface OK with IMAP mail clients such as MacOS Mail and
Linux Thunderbird OK (unless you want automatic calendaring integration).

On the whole, the Exchange web interface and the Exchange implementation has
improved a lot over the years - it was a desaster initially; Linux users could
only use the 'light' web front end and setting forwarding, filtering or
autoreply options did require a real Outlook client.

If you have a genuine problem with IMAP access to Exchange, I've found the IT
support staff to be helpful and competent. If you can't get help from your
faculty IT support, get in contact with me and I can give you the settings I use
in Thunderbird.

-- mschmitz

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Groklaw © Copyright 2003-2013 Pamela Jones.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
Comments are owned by the individual posters.

PJ's articles are licensed under a Creative Commons License. ( Details )