Good evening from Singapore,
I am torn between deploying Microsoft Exchange 2016 and Linux-based SMTP servers like sendmail, postfix, qmail and exim.
Relative ease of installation and configuration is an important consideration factor.
I think we didn't hear about some important points:
How many people in your IT-department? How large is your organization? What do your users need and want? Where is your experience?
The reason I am asking the third question is that exchange is certainly not only a mail system. It offers a lot of other functionality like calendar and I don't know what. For me, it was an easy decision. More than 20 years ago my organization wanted to implement a mail system. Microsoft was a t that time still in stone age and it may be that they didn't even have a server based solution available at that time. Bottom line, if you are heading for a mail server system, go for Postfix, dovecot, etc. Btw., we NEVER lost a single mail. I still have mails from 1998 :-)
Both paths may be suitable, but with Linux, you are pretty safe of nasty things that do not do as you want. I know that this MS-bugs bother me a lot at my users workstations, so why should it be different at the server side.
Michael
Michael