Any type of MIME encoding would cause the message to get munged beyond readability on routing to the recipient. Fixes do exist for these problems. And as we later determined, except for the MIME issue, all the problems we had with OpenMail were due to Outlook and the MAPI service provider. But we didn't know that at the time, which meant that it was too late for OpenMail for this company. If you are looking for the enterprise capabilities of HP OpenMail or Microsoft Exchange, remember that sendmail will not offer them to you.
Small businesses are very price-sensitive.
OpenMail, which is free for 50 users or less, holds a similar attraction. But in order for OpenMail to succeed with small businesses, it will need to have an intuitive interface for non-UNIX people to use. And Hewlett-Packard will need to improve the product's integration with packages like Outlook, so companies don't spend days wrestling with it. Because for at least one company, that was a deal-killer. Joshua Drake is the Webmaster of the Linux Documentation Project and the owner of Command Prompt Inc., a Linux and e-commerce company.