Wow, OSX Server really really sucks these days.
I have three Xserves in my office that all ran OSX Tiger Server. While not littered with super-advanced options for everything (i.e. I ended up downloading and compiling PHP, Apache and MySQL seperately), it handled mail quite nice.
But since I moved them to my office and out of production, I figured I'd install Lion server on them (they won't run Mountain Lion, which also sucks).
Well, Lion server is a pile of shit. It's a set of applications that are made for people that can't handle something more complex than a crayon.
Again, Tiger server admin wasn't really "advanced", but Lion server admin is kindergarden. Let me show you some comparison shots of the admin interface for the Mail service. This is on Tiger:
As I said, not very fancy, but still some useful functions, such as hosting for multiple domains and authentication encryption. The interface for assigning email addresses to users is really awkward in Tiger server:
That's the workgroup manager, and to add an email alias to a user, you add it as a "short name", which doesn't make any sense.
And this is the Mail service admin interface for Lion:
That's just stupid. There are NO options. I can't do anything! And this is the interface for editing a user:
No way to host multiple domains, no way to add email aliases, not even a way to use a SSL certificate! It has gone from simple to mind-numbingly stupid.
Mind you, all these options are still there - in the underlying BSD flatfile configurations. You can still do everything and more! But Apples interface is just a stupid mess.
Also - I'm sure that for that super small company, this might be enough, I don't know. But for anything above the ordinary, it falls way short. And sucks!
So the next move is to move from OSX Tiger to Linux Debian for mail. Anyone know how to migrate? The SMTP is postfix and the IMAP server is Cyrus. I should start googling this.
Update
Apparently, the old "simple" admin tools are still available from Apple here, and brings back the interface you have in Tiger Server. So it doesn't suck as much. My bad! And thanks to Alan Baker for pointing this out.