installing big qmail server ... where to start?

Ed Stover estover at nativenerds.com
Thu May 5 09:00:52 PDT 2005


Matthias F. Brandstetter 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)
>  - 100MB quota per user
>  - autoresponder
>  - about 50.000 user
>  - online backup of data
>  - some more featuers for web frontend
> 
> 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?".


Some possible tutorials to help you on your way are:

	QMR (qmail rocks) FreeBSD
	http://freebsd.qmailrocks.org/
	( Has Mysql, vpopmail, clam-av, spamassin,  )

	Mail Toaster
	http://www.tnpi.biz/internet/mail/toaster/index.shtml
	(has mysql)

An honest 50,000 users an mysql implementation might be a little more
hardware intensive then an ldap in the long run so you might want to
drop a mail to freebsd-isp mailing list and ask around there too for
ldap stuff.

Dont forget to if you plan on using maildir as a mail storage solution
then remember that inodes become very important because you WILL run out
of them. A solution can be found in the existing man pages, read "man
tuning" before proceeding onto building your server. You might want to
stay away from old school imap software like imap-uw because they lack
the advanced features like quota support that you will need to enforce
quotas for your users.




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