If you've ever worked in a corporate environment in the modern digital age, you've come to accept the central role of email in everything you do. Now, imagine for a moment if you were told today that your organization was going to be switching email systems AND email addresses. All your mailing lists would need updating, you'll have to setup the new account, possibly new software, notify people of the change, and so on. This is precisely what I'm going through this week.
Our organization is moving away from our internal email system, which we share with our customers, to a standardized corporate mail system (major brand product). As a Linux user, this has been a bit of a challenge because there are lots of little discrepancies between my mail client and the preferred brand name client. To say it's been a learning experience would be an understatement.
Things that I've learned so far include:
* Thunderbird does not always play nicely with Exchange.
* Listserv doesn't always work as designed, requiring fall-back to legacy use patterns (e.g., sending reply emails to confirm changes instead of using confirmation links).
* Thunderbird does not always work as designed. For example, you can add a custom header in Message Filters, but (at least under Linux) that header simply does not seem to work. Or, there's a nuance that I'm missing. At any rate, it's making life more difficult.
* Either an IMAP nuance or an Exchange IMAP issue, but even though you've deleted a message from your inbox, it's still there on the Exchange server, even though Thunderbird doesn't show it. You need to Expunge the files to actually delete them for real. So, apparently delete != delete.
* It's easier to complain about a problem than to fix it.
* The advent of the wiki has been darned handy for sharing tips, tricks, feedback, concerns, etc. However, it's been the mailing list that has produced the most instant results when problems were encountered.
* I'm easily amused by small discrepancies, such as SSL being required to get IMAP working, but TLS being required to get SMTP working. Shouldn't the checkbox be "secure" or "not secure"? Let the mail client probe, figure it out, and save the settings, retesting every 10-45 days or something.
* The feeling of relief of nearing completion of the migration as an individual user was nice. It's that feeling of stress and tension bleeding away that drives us to do what we do, I guess.
