RE: Gartner Group: DO NOT USE IIS!

The reason I brought up SMTP and POP3 is that our AS/400 is not connected to
the internet, and the only way to send email on the AS/400 (to other non-400
systems) is via SMTP. The only way into the Exchange site connector/MAPI
format is through an Exchange gateway running both MAPI and SMTP. We
currently send email by pointing our SMTP router to the SMTP gateway at
division HQ.

Our corporate policy is to REMOVE email from the server after 30 days. If I
want to keep a copy of old email, I must keep it on my machine. Disk storage
RE email is a non-issue for us. But point taken.

I do agree with your other points. I'm waiting for the RFC that depreciates
ASCII mail and promotes HTML & RTF email. :)

Loyd

-----Original Message-----
From: Walden H. Leverich [mailto:WaldenL@TechSoftInc.com]
Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2001 11:14 AM
To: 'midrange-l@midrange.com'
Subject: RE: Gartner Group: DO NOT USE IIS!


This time I'm not simply taking the pro-MS stance, honest! <G>

1) You shouldn't be allowed to run SMTP and POP3 internally! If you're
allowed to run SMTP outbound how is the company to monitor e-mail? What
about virus scanning? Perhaps the footer the legal department puts on each
outbound e-mail. Also, do you, the desktop user, understand the network
architecture? There may be reasons that you can't send e-mail from your
location and it's must be routed through another location.

As for POP3, it sucks! It's extremely good at MOVING messages from the
server to your PC. Now since you, of course, backup your pc every night
there is no problem recovering messages when you crash your pc. Also you, of
course, run a web server on your pc with the appropriate holes in the
firewall to allow you to access all these locally stored messages from any
web server in the world, right? How about viruses, you have the latest virus
software rescan every message in your private message store when the virus
definitions are updated, right? Finally, what about storage? A centralized
copy of an e-mail to 30 people with an 1 meg attachment takes 1 meg to
store, if every person downloads a copy it takes 30 meg. Leave e-mail on a
centralized server where it belongs. Now if you want to talk IMAP maybe I'll
listen, but the reality is that everyone uses POP3 not IMAP.

2) RFCs and standards won't obviate the Office 97/2K/XP format problem. MS
doesn't change formats just to annoy people, they change them to include new
features in the document. If you need to change the document layout to
accommodate a feature you'll break old code, period, I don't care if the
format was MS's proprietary one or one found in RFC123456. Yes, we can argue
about ways to go about making changes backwards compatible, but come on, at
some point you give up and say, move forward everyone. After all, were not
all using ASCII text for our documents, that that was a standard.

-Walden

------------
Walden H Leverich III
President
Tech Software
(516)627-3800 x11
WaldenL@TechSoftInc.com
http://www.TechSoftInc.com