system. These servers facilitate receiving mail from a remote site. After it is installed, the documentation is found in /usr/share/doc/imap and the Read Me is brief; Fedora has already done the configuration for you; you need only start the services (see Chapter 15, 'Remote Access with SSH').
Biff and its KDE cousin KOrn are small daemons that monitor your mail folder and notify you when a message has been placed there. It is common to include biff y in the .login or .profile files to automatically start it upon user login if you want to use Biff. You can start KOrn by adding the applet to the KDE taskbar.
Autoresponders automatically generate replies to received messages; they are commonly used to notify others that the recipient is out of the office. Mercifully, Fedora does not include one, but you can find and install an autoresponder at Freshmeat.net. If you subscribe to a mailing list, be aware that automatic responses from your account can be very annoying to others on the list. Please unsubscribe from mail lists before you leave the office with your autoresponder activated.
Alternatives to Microsoft Exchange Server
One of the last areas in which a Microsoft product has yet to be usurped by open source software is a replacement for MS Exchange Server. Many businesses use MS Outlook and MS Exchange Server to access email and to provide calendaring, notes, file sharing, and other collaborative functions. General industry complaints about Exchange Server center around scalability, administration (backup and restore in particular), and licensing fees.
A drop-in alternative needs to have compatibility with MS Outlook because it's intended to replace Exchange Server in an environment in which there are Microsoft desktops in existence using Outlook. A work-alike alternative provides similar features to Exchange Server, but does not offer compatibility with the MS Outlook client itself; this incompatibility with Outlook is typical of many of the open source alternatives.
Several drop-in alternatives exist, none of which is fully open source because some type of proprietary connector is needed to provide the services to MS Outlook clients (or provide Exchange services to the Linux Evolution client). For Outlook compatibility, the key seems to be the realization of a full, open implementation of
Of course, independent applications for these functions abound in the open source world, but one characteristic of groupware is its central administration; another is that all components can share information.
The following sections examine several of the available servers, beginning with MS Exchange Server itself and moving toward those applications that have increasing incompatibility with it. None of these servers are provided with Fedora.
Microsoft Exchange Server/Outlook Client
Exchange Server and Outlook seem to be the industry benchmark because of their wide spread deployment. They offer a proprietary server providing email, contacts, scheduling, public folders, task lists, journaling, and notes using MS Outlook as the client and MAPI as the API. If you consider what MS Exchange offers as the full set of features, no other replacement offers 100% of the features exactly as provided by MS Exchange Server — even those considered drop-in replacements. The home page for the Microsoft Exchange Server is http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/.
CommuniGate Pro
CommuniGate Pro is a proprietary, drop-in alternative to MS Exchange Server, providing, email, webmail, LDAP directories, a web server, file server, contacts, calendaring (third-party), and a list server. The CommuniGate Pro MAPI Connector provides access to the server from MS Outlook and other MAPI-enabled clients. The home page for this server is http://www.stalker.com/.
Oracle Collaboration Suite
Oracle Collaboration Suite, or OCS as it is known, is a proprietary application that supports deployment on Linux. It provides a number of services, including email (both POP and IMAP based), file sharing, calendaring, and instant messaging to name but a few. You can find it at http://www.oracle.com/collabsuite/.
Open Xchange
The Open Xchange message server is based on Cyrus-imap and Postfix. Most of the server's groupware features are provided by a proprietary web-based groupware server (ComFire). Open Xchange also uses Apache, OpenLDAP, and Samba to provide public directories, notes, webmail, scheduler, tasks, project management, document management, forums, and bookmarks. Some compatibility with MS Outlook is provided. The home page is http://www.open-xchange.org/.
You will use the following commands to manage electronic mail in Fedora:
> balsa — A GNOME mail user agent for X
> biff — A console-based mail notification utility
> evolution — A comprehensive and capable Ximian GNOME mail PIM for X
> fetchmail — A console-based and daemon-mode mail retrieval command for Linux
> fetchmailconf — A graphical Fetchmail configuration client for X
> kmail — A graphical mail user client for KDE and X
> korn — A biff applet for KDE and X
> mail — A console-based mail user agent
> mutt — A console-based mail user agent
> sendmail — A comprehensive mail transport agent for UNIX and Linux
> xbiff — A mail notification X client
