Not entirely unfamiliar with messaging concepts, I have to confess I've never waded into the UNIX environment in the messaging arena.
I'd recommend starting out with Red Hat Linux. It'll be easiest to build Courier there, or you can use pre-built packages (which is even easier).
I put mine here: http://www.dragonsdawn.net/ftp/dragonsdawn-packages/7.3/i386/
You can also get "apt" from that site and install courier with: apt-get install courier courier-imapd courier-maildrop courier-smtpauth
1. I'm looking for full featured messaging and not just email. Exchange Server offered (for a dear price both financially and professionally) facilities for handling contacts,
An LDAP server normally offers contacts service. It's not built in to Courier.
tasks, calendaring,
Courier includes a web based calendar program.
public folders
http://www.courier-mta.org/maildirmake.html Look at the sections on shared folders.
2. Exchange Server offers OWA (Outlook Web Access). A very handy feature. For my part, I'm committing to Apache and Zope as well as PostgreSQL. Courier seems to offer SqWebmail as an integrated product. I used it briefly and, although it was certainly functional, I wasn't impressed with the interface. Can alternative products be easily introduced to replace SqWebmail.
Yes. Squirrelmail is a very popular one, for instance. Because programs other than SqWebmail use IMAP, they'll have more overhead. SqWebmail accesses the Maildir directly, and caches some of its metadata in files for faster access. That feature won't be found in web based IMAP clients.
3. Exchange Server is utterly dependant on IIS and will not work without it. As I mentioned above, I've committed to Apache, etc. Are there any problems with Courier's interaction with Apache, or any other webserver?
Not that I know of. SqWebmail should work with basically any web server. Other applications (Squirrelmail, again for instance) are written in PHP, so your ability to use them with something else will depend on the something else's PHP support.
4. With respect to volume, Can Courier and it's related products take advantage of SMP if the OS is supporting it?
Yes.
On a single CPU system, at what point does Courier begin to brake?
There are many more factors than CPU. CPU is only really a bottleneck if you're doing a lot of complicated filtering on your messages. Most of the time disk bandwidth and network latency will be bigger issues.
If you're looking for scalable, my preferred setup is an NFS server storing /home and a cluster of servers, each identically configured, handling SMTP and POP3/IMAP sessions. When you run out of juice, add another machine to the cluster :)
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