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Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

What is it that Outlook and Exchange can do? I'm surprised that it's this and not word/excel that would be the blocker. Open source seems well-established within the email ecosystem...

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They do fully integrated enterprise commications:

* Mail (often with proprietary additions, also shared mailboxes)

* Calendar (appointments, mostly: plan with others’ free/busy times, invitations, invitation replies, integration with resource booking, …)

* Global Address Book

* Tasks (To-do list, can also be mailed)

I don’t know any non-proprietary solutions that integrate all this in a decently user-friendly way. Google certainly does, but then you might as well stay with Microsoft. It’s not just about the service capabilities either: The client (be it a web or a desktop application) has to be good as well.

At least it is able to move almost all my e-mails to spam folder (where they are deleted after a month), without any way to disable this "feature" except by slowly whitelisting senders.

Another great "feature" is that if you have accounts on two different organizations, it seems to be impossible to logon to the other account even after signing out from the first account, unless you use private mode on the browser.

> unless you use private mode on the browser.

Check out Multi-Account Containers if you're using Firefox. They solve this exact problem.

Modify your Firefox shortcut to:

firefox -ProfileManager or firefox.exe -ProfileManager

All your problems solved, and even others you didn't expect you could ;)

Mailbox/retention policies can be tweaked, as well as mail flow ones by your administrator. With that said, depending on the combination of other antimalware/antispam apps that your company uses and Microsoft being quite pushy about their antispam for some reason, even that may not be a perfect solution.

I am trying for years to replace Outlook - Exchange is no Problem- but everybody wants the Look and feeling of Outlook. If you have a viable alternative working on Linux, Mac and Windows, please tell me! I am using Evolution right now.

Isn’t Gmail widespread enough to be appreciated?

If your plan is to move away from O365 frying pan them jumping into Google's fire is definitely not the way to go.

If your worry is violating Schrems 2 https://iapp.org/news/a/the-schrems-ii-decision-eu-us-data-t... why would you choose Gmail?

Try searching for Linagora. They have solutions that are open source and caters to this particular problem.

Group Calendar and Email in a corporate setting with hundreds of people.

I guess gmail/google calendar can play in this space, but are there any open source options?

We're quite happy with what Linagora [1] offered a few years back. It's a French company so they work within EU framework of law. Their products are all open source, they only sell support services.

[1] : https://www.linagora.com/en/

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