I’m currently participating an early adoption program for a Notes 8 rollout and so far I’m less than satisfied with the new “features”. Strolling through the forum pages to get a clue why I’m having certain effects on my client I ran across some posts from people who, according to their suggestions, clearly don’t know a thing about corporate messaging.

They’re not alone in their lack of understanding for sure, but do you want to trust the future of your company to IT managers or administrators that suggest switching from a Domino/Exchange/Groupwise/… messaging server to some POP3 server with a Thunderbird Mail Client?

If your answer is Yes please continue reading.

Of course a proper messaging system is expensive. Of course it needs a lot of administration and maintenance. Of course you will have to carefully plan and size the server infrastructure if you need more than two servers.

But all of this is no reason not to use any of these systems.

Today email is most critical form of corporate communication. Loosing some of your business emails can cost your and/or your company a fortune. To reduce the risk of loosing data, companies tend to create backups of everything important… or at least they should. But how do you backup POP3 emails?

To Answer this we need a short and incredibly rudimentary explanation of how POP3 emails get into your inbox.

  1. The sender sends an email to your address
  2. The email somehow arrives at your mail server and is stored in your mail account file (usually an encrypted text file, unless encryption wasn’t turned on)
  3. You open your mail client and it starts downloading your new emails from the mail account file
  4. After all the new emails have been transferred the mail account file will be emptied

You will see that making a backup of the company emails will only be possible on the users computer, which is the last place you want to make a backup of. But this is another story.

On a proper messaging server all the emails (incoming and outgoing) will stay on the server and the mail clients will only receive a copy to work with. Creating a backup here will only include the mail storage of your messaging servers.

Oh… and you won’t loose all our emails once your desktop harddrive crashes. I wish I had a penny for every time that happened to one of my customers.

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