installing big qmail server ... where to start?

Paul Schmehl pauls at utdallas.edu
Wed May 4 10:32:40 PDT 2005


--On Wednesday, May 04, 2005 12:58:39 PM +0200 "Matthias F. Brandstetter" 
<haimat at lame.at> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I have to plan and setup a mail solution for about 50.000 users, here are
> some key features requested by our customer:
>
>  - self coded webfrontend w/ webmail and administration (filter, alias
> etc)

I'm not sure what you mean by self coded.  Squirrelmail is a webmail front 
end that meets the requirements you've mentioned.  There are others as well.

  - 100MB quota per user

I would recommend that you put the mailboxes on a separate partition - 
perhaps even put var on a separate drive - and you should probably use 
RAID0 at least.

>  - autoresponder
>  - about 50.000 user
>  - online backup of data

Without knowing if you're local or remote, it's hard to say.  I do backups 
on a remote server using rsync to a local disk and rsync over ssh to a 
remote disk.  The local backups make it easy to restore something in a 
pinch.  The remote backups ensure that I don't lose data if the server 
crashes and both disks are toast.

>  - some more featuers for web frontend

Like what?
>
> Since I happily use qmail for some other (but smaller) installations, I
> want to try it with qmail here for this project as well. My only problem
> is, I have no clue where to start ... beginning from "should I use 2
> redundant and really strong or some more but cheaper servers?" to "which
> qmail distributions and patches should I use (ldap, mysql, ...)?" and
> "how  to store data (mails) and do online backup w/o downtime?".
>
Mail servers have a lot of I/O so you should use SCSI disks, if possible. 
RAID mirroring at least.

I think LDAP would make user admin a lot easier.  Mysql would probably help 
as well, given the number of users.

I'm not sure I know what you mean by "store data (mails).  If you're using 
qmail, set up IMAP and the mails are stored in maildir (I think).  You can 
create a virtual user so you don't have to have /home/{uid} for all 50,000 
users.

Surely there's a doc on the web that walks you through all of this?  No 
sense in reinventing the wheel.....

Paul Schmehl (pauls at utdallas.edu)
Adjunct Information Security Officer
The University of Texas at Dallas
AVIEN Founding Member
http://www.utdallas.edu


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