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Comment by hexo | Hacker News Reader

Whats the point of using exchange? Why people can't just use regular mail servers? Whats different?

It ties in easily with AD, does shared mailboxes, calendars, contact lists, meetings, automatic out of office, sorting, legal hold, archiving, backup etc relatively easily without having to glue together a hundred different things.

MS will support it & offers training. It can be managed easily by the same windows admins they have managing their AD infrastructure and desktop support.

Every company I've worked at who uses self-hosted exchange uses it because that's what they used 20 years ago. I don't know companies deliberately using it.

I suppose office 365 is different. Smaller companies get a good bundle with Teams, Office, mail etc..

Calendars, push, a bunch of other stuff that's useful

It's not perfect but it's by far the best mail server for internal Email.

I'm more interested in hearing why these Sys Admins haven't switched over to O365 yet?

A local Exchange server has vastly better uptime than Office 365, works when cloud services and the ISP is down, and costs drastically less. Hilariously, the standing advice has usually been for Exchange Online customers to still install and operate a local Exchange server too, which means switching to the cloud didn't even reduce your management or hosting burden at all.

Sure, you get the occasional bug like this, but it's less often than Microsoft screwing up the entire cloud.

> Hilariously, the standing advice has usually been for Exchange Online customers to still install and operate a local Exchange server too

Only if you have a large tenant (> 2000 mailboxes) at the time of transition, and even then there’s ways around it. I think if you were getting advice today, it would be to avoid hybrid as much as possible and find any other way to move over because of this stupid requirement.

As of the last time I checked (6 mos. ago) there is still no supported managemenrt solution for Exchange Online without local Exchange if you migrated to Exchange Online via a hybrid migration.

Some people just modify AD attributes directly to get around having an on-prem Exchange install but that's not officially supported.

You could have 15 people in an org and it's entirely unsupported to drop the Exchange server if you wish to have AD synced users regrettably. MS are very clear that "ways around it" go against their recommendations, even if I don't like it myself.

Cost. Especially if you have a large amount of users, and you already have the IT staff and servers to run it on (you can try to justify it with less admin costs and less server costs but the numbers don't add up for some orgs)

As an example, I worked at a healthcare org and it would have been $70,000 a year for hosted Outlook, but only $110,000 to buy the software outright and run it for ten years (700,000 - 110,000 is a big savings)

HN wisdom is that it's impossible to run a single raspberry pi with less than $2m/year spend on IT staff alone

You also have to run a datacentre or server room with the on-prem version

>and you already have the IT staff and servers to run it on (you can try to justify it with less admin costs and less server costs but the numbers don't add up for some orgs)

If you limit mailbox sizes you can run 500 users on a pretty modest VM

And meat terraform/ansible to run those.

Are they actually different, as in the nuts and bolts, or just different shells on top of the same infrastructure?

You pay very little for these things to be someone else's problem.

What are other good self-hosted email server options?

https://mailinabox.email/

I don't know... postfix?

Doesn't even have webmail.

It doesn't need to, its just a backend. Postfix lists 8 webmail options, but you could use any interface you can find.

http://www.postfix.org/addon.html#web

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