We've istalled many SBS with exchange, and I regret all of them but one.

The one that utilizes what is in exchange uses it's shared calendaring and shared contacts.

However this can be accomplished today with the business addition to Outlook.

In the past our company used Pegasus mail exclusivly.  Later we were forced to switch to a Windows server platform with Exchange server 5.5.  Our mail server sucks right now.  The IT department has been looking for a low cost replacement for exchange that could run on Linux (preferred) or windows.  I have downloaded Mercury and Pegasus Mail.  Running Pegasus mail is easy.  I have difficulty understanding how to set up Mercury for our purposes, which are (email. calendaring/scheduling, public folders, notice boards etc.) I don't need to replace all the capabilities of what outlook 98 provides exactly,  some alternate solution for these functions would do nicely.  I think Mercury can do it, but I'm not sure, as I don't have a lot of time to devote to it.   We are also looking at Zimbra and Scalix but have not had much success with these either.  I would like anyone's opinion on this subject.

Thanks in advance

Tommy 

Pegasus Mail can, obviously, handle e-mail related needs. It can also handle the public folders and noticeboards.

Mercury/32 can also handle pretty much all e-mail related tasks, including IMAP, POP3, SMTP, mailing lists, spam and virus filtering, etc. Mercury/32 is also lightweight in the resources department, and fast.

The place where you will have to look for extra features is in the calendaring/scheduling area. Neither Pegasus Mail nor Mercury/32 yet support any form of calendaring. (It's on the list of desired features, but no timeframe is available.) If you don't *need* it integrated into your mail client, then you can use other web-based solutions to handle this task.
 

It really depends on how you utilize exchange 5.5.  If your organization only uses the mail features of exchange, Mercury and Pegasus would be perfectly acceptable.  However, if you are using the group collaboration tools of Exchange (calendars (shared or not), tasks, public folders, blackberry/trio device support), Mercury and Pegasus may not be the solution.

From your description, i'd hazard a guess that your organization will need more than a mail server such as Mercury.  Don't take my statement as discrediting Mercury.  For a standard mail server, Mercury is hands down the best i've seen out of the box.  What it has been designed for, it does incredibly well along with out of the box features, that exchange (to pick on it for a few mintues) is sorely lacking.  The extra features that Mercury is integrated with (and the 3rd party "modules") is by far some of the best thought out and implemented.

 As with Rob's post, if you can solve the collaboration needs with other solutions, Mercury is an excellent choice for mail handling. 

I've never liked comparing Exchange and Mercury.  They are part of the same solution tree (mail handling) but that's really where the similarities end. IMHO