Questions[hosted-exchange](server)

About six months ago we transitioned from an in-house Exchange 2003 server to a hosted Exchange 2010 service.

For the most part this has worked well, but the providers OWA constantly times out. About 6/10 requests time out or more, and it's gotten to the point where OWA is just unusable. To give you an example: I'll login, read an email, choose reply and the window for replying gives me a request has timed out message. After a few attempts I'll get it to work and reply. After that I'll read another email and it'll timeout.

I contacted the provider about this and they said it's a known issue with Exchange 2010, for all providers, they're working with Microsoft to correct the issue, and there is no ETA.

To be clear this isn't a session issue. I don't have to login, it just says the request timed out and to try again. After a few attempts it does work. It's just extremely annoying.

I've spent a litte time researching the problem and I can't find anything that would suggest it's a common issue. Exchange 2010 has been around for a while, so I would suspect that if it was a huge problem it would have been corrected by now.

So is my provider full of crap, or is there really an issue that has yet to be corrected? If the issue does exist, is there any docs on it?

I have used several top tier third party Exchange providers over the years, and all of them have had regular scheduled downtimes for routine maintenance (roughly once a month). I am wondering what is it about Exchange that makes it impossible to avoid downtime of this nature? Is it truly impossible to maintain 24x7 uptime or just prohibitively expensive and why?

We recently started using Microsoft's Hosted Exchange offering with Outlook 2010, and are very happy with it. So far we have been able to easily migrate calendars and contacts from old PST files into Exchange without any problems.

The only data still in PST files is archived email. I'm concerned about the bandwidth implications of having users upload all of their archived messages. We have a 30-40 GB of stored messages for all users combined, with some users having PST files that are several GB in size. We have three sites with the following bandwidth specs:

• Main office (25 users) is 5 Mbps / 5 Mbps
• First branch (10 users) is 5 Mbps / 512 Kbps
• Second branch (5 users) is 512 Kbps / 512 Kbps

If all the users start copying their messages into their Exchange mailboxes at once, will this kill our inter-site performance? Is Outlook/Exchange smart enough to reduce bandwidth use when the network connection is saturated, or do I need to ensure that QoS is configured before starting this?

Looking further down the road, what happens when a user with a 5 GB mailbox moves to a new computer? Does the entire 5 GB need to be re-downloaded, or can the OST from the previous computer be used to accelerate the process?

Any insight would be appreciated.

I'm trying to get email reports from our AWS EC2 instances. We're using Exchange Online (part of Microsoft Online Services). I've setup a user account specifically for SMTP relaying, and I've setup Postfix to meet all the requirements to relay messages through this server. However, Exchange Online's SMTP server will reject messages unless the From address exactly matches the authentication address (the error message is 550 5.7.1 Client does not have permissions to send as this sender).

With careful configuration, I can setup my services to send as this user. But I'm not a huge fan of being careful - I'd rather have postfix force the issue. Is there a way to do this?

I've been using a hosted exchange server environment (dslExtreme) for years. Originally, I used it w/ Outlook, but now that I have a Mac, I use Entourage. I also use my iPhone to connect to my ES account. I've been the only user and I don't have any plans to change that.

It has been something of a hassle to deal w/ the periodic upgrades of the vendor's server environment and the need to have my MX record pointed to a different vendor than my web-hosting company. Moreover, microsoft's client-based spam filter is fairly useless.

What sorts of features can I expect to lose/gain if I migrate from a hosted, exchange-server 2007 environment to the IMAP/SMTP environment of my web-host?