We use DirectAdmin on our bare metal servers on the high-traffic sites but almost not at all for email anymore. We use cPanel shared hosting account at Bluehost for that which supports WebDAV, CalDAV, and CardDAV. I see you hit the *DAV wall too. A post on another thread asked how they used it and went unanswered. This post illustrates why not having *DAV support is a show stopper.
- ActiveSync is no longer the standard in the industry except at Microsoft. Even Google has dropped it. *DAV has taken that crown and has had it for quite a while.
- *DAV is currently the only ETF-standard's based protocol to share contact and calendar information across user devices, and between users, without being tied to a vendor, ecosystem, or subscription, and supports http file sharing.
- WebDAV enables you to have or sell space like Dropbox and OneDrive space does.
- CalDAV enables you to have personal and shared company-wide calendars even at the user level.
- CardDAV enables you to have a personal and shared company-wide contacts.
- CardDAV and CalDAV are have compatible webmail clients Horde or RoundCube, and Horde includes *DAV admin and sync. Desktop clients include the FOSS Thunderbird, which is already superior to Outlook, and runs across Windows, Mac, and Linux. *DAV works with Android and IOS email clients.
- Outlook for Windows, even though free to me, has become more infuriating with every release. For anyone managing multiple IMAP accounts it is utter nonsense because it doesn't support unified folders, even though users by the millions have been screaming for it for the past 10 years. OAuth has been an IETF since 2010 and greatly simplified authenticated email access as supported by public email services, but is not supported by Outlook. In new versions of Outlook you can't even configure email account settings in one place anymore. You have to use the Control Panel Mail applet plus inside Outlook. Changes often require you to maintain both areas. Outlook's global search has been gone for a long time and its search horizon has become less and less. Today, you can't even rely on it working for a single folder, let alone a single account.(Google and see what I mean) It doesn't natively have effective spam filtering. Fortunately there are plug-ins for that but then you need to maintain them separately and risk incompatibilities during updates. Next, Outlook also does not support *DAV. I used to pay an extra $80 to buy Office Home and Business over Home and Student just to get Outlook. Today, they would have to pay me to use it.
- Thunderbird is an email client I had evaluated several times in the past and found it lacking. Very recent changes have brought together every piece necessary to function in a multi-device integrated environment, and the only email desktop client that does, at any price. Unlike Outlook, it supports OAuth 2.0, making 2FA on public email providers a lot easier. In the past, its filtering rules were too lame. Not any more. Unlike the useless native anti-spam in Outlook, it has user-friendly and effective Bayesian filtering. (Today, with shared email accounts, I designate one user to train the Bayesian filtering for shared IMAP accounts.) I was concerned with how well it could handle large email stores. I learned Thunderbird handles large amounts of data better than Outlook, and its search makes Outlook look silly. I learned moving it to a new machine is very simple and doesn't screw up the replication. I wasn't expecting to discover it has background processes that automatically optimizes and consolidates while you are working. E.G. you never have to rebuild an index or reclaim space. It tells you when it wants to do this, and takes seconds even on large stores. After working with its default tabbed interface during this testing, the Outlook-style interfaces of other clients became an annoyance. It's like going backwards from today's browsers with their Firefox-inspired tabbed interface, to pre-Firefox when when it was one site at a time or a one-app-at-a-time cell phone. It also is multi-platform, which means Linux also. The mobile email client K-9 developers have merged with the Thunderbird team to produce a Thunderbird mobile app with the same look and functionality, and not simply a mobile email client that is totally different that simply shares the same name, as is the case with Outlook.
- This combination is the only practical method to manage multiple IMAP accounts across private and public email systems, does not require you to store your personal data on someone else's server, with no subscriptions required, and is supported by open source apps that are now better than the legacy commercial apps they replace. Microsoft 365 is a bargain if you only have one email account per user and one domain. It doesn't make sense for those who manage multiple domains, have multiple IMAP email accounts, and need shared hosting for their web sites anyway. 90+% of users simply want decent spam filtering, to share address books and calendars across their devices, to share company-wide contacts and calendars, and for collaboration to simply share cloud storage somewhere both personally and with others. With Microsoft 365 they get mediocre and clumsy email filtering, and an environment that is slow and too complex to manage for the average user, with advanced features that they have no practical use for. By the time a company gets to the size where the more advanced features become practical, they have in-house IT.
- This is the age of VPNs, people want some privacy, and *DAV is the cheapest, easiest, and most flexible way to obtain that.
*None of this is theory on my part. This is where I live. People have gotten concerned about about privacy. People are subscribing to VPNs and moving out of Google. There are large businesses based on selling *DAV capabilities. cPanel has implemented it using open source apps. People have been asking for it here since 2011. It would be interesting to know why DirectAdmin hasn't implemented it. In the past, DirectAdmin has implemented everything of any significance that cPanel did, and did it better.
