In a job interview a long time ago I was asked what I hate to do the most. At the time my response was, "write USB device drivers." I had to do that at Sorenson Vision and I hated it. When you write device drivers you can really mess up a system. You screw up a pointer (C code) and the computer will reboot over and over ad infinitum. Then you get to rebuild the machine. Oops. The other problem was that you always got blamed when the system didn't work whether it was your fault or not.
Random employee: "Hey look, the computer's on fire."
QA: "We think it was caused by a bad device driver."
I hated those QA guys.
Today I hate email servers and Microsoft Exchange more than I hate USB drivers. I have been trying to migrate emails from an exchange server at Intermedia.net to gmail. I hate Intermedia's exchange servers. The past two days have been filled with click, wait 30 seconds, click wait, copy paste.
I hope their servers burn in hell.
Tags: email2 Comments
2 responses so far ↓
[...] These guys will burn in hell along with Intermedia’s Servers [...]
I second that. I’m sure there is some amount of “good job, guys” that could be said about Intermedia, being the first ones to go out and host Exchange, and if everyone just used outlook only all the time, and didn’t mind getting locked into and trapped in outlook then it usually works, But at the same time, their very existence causes small to medium sized companies to get sucked into using their services because there is the seductive illusion that the email is stable and useful, and for the real email users who have come accustomed to having choice, freedom of what email clients and operating systems they use, Intermedia / Exchange is horrible product, and nothing short of a big f*ck you to IMAP mail users of all likes.
Apparently for IMAP to work well in Exchange, it needs to be enabled on a per profile setting, and its off by default. Another gotcha with Microsoft’s creative licensing model is somehow each mode of transport that is enabled, per user, requires its own client access license.
In that when I log into exchange with the exchange protocol, thats one license. But if I log out and close all connections, and log into exchange through the imap connector, it seems the IMAP connector eats up one client access license, and the internal communication between IMAP and exchange inside the server consumes a second client access license. Same for POP connector, webmail connector. So its quite easy to exceed the license capacity of the exchange server (and very frequently it happens where I would log into web mail, log out, and it seems as though the license gets sticky attached to the web mail connector, so by later in the day when i use imap it just grabs another license from the pool.
And even worse, my theory form current attempts to use IMAP, is if I connect to the service from one IMAP client at my office and then later connect from a differnet IMAP client at my house, it seems that IMAP busts and I get a -1263 error forever. My guess is the licensing model is restrictive enough to only allow one IMAP connection for one client from one IP address.
Any how, I really wonder how long things like Exchange and companies like Intermedia will keep propagating the evil. Especially when there are now already so many, many better enterprise ready email products out there. For example, PostFix SMTP + DBMail + postgresql + openldap + roundcube mail. All of these basically integrate well out of box, and its very easy to customize the behavior slightly, and you get a very functional SMTP, IMAP server where the emails are stored in a database and the accounts are stored in LDAP, but most importantly, IMAP just works, well.