Mail back-up system

[Rafi Jacoby]

> Olivier Nicole <on at cs.ait.ac.th> writes:
>
>> > I read the article and the idea is good. But i would like to know what
>> MTA
>> > are you using..In the paper you said that at first the email is
>> strored in
>> > Mailbox format. Isn`t that a bottleneck. WHat are the loads of the
>> machines=
>>
>> Considering we have only 200 users and 3000 messages per day, whatever
>> would do.
>>
>> MTA is sendmail/milter.
>>
>> I plan to change that mailbox thing when I get budget for a new
>> machine to play with (I don't want to take the risk to break the
>> working configuration).
>
> Mailbox format might not be a bottleneck in this application.  It's
> fairly efficient at appending new messages, and that is the only
> common operation being performed on these backup mail spools.

I could see this as an advantage of the Maildirs format.

Since every mail is stored in its own file (versus concatenation in Mbox),
it's much cheaper to backup. Just copy all the new/touched files, not all
your mail.

I just have a second disk on the server that I rsync everything to on an
hourly basis.

I use Matt Simerson's excellent Mail Toaster scripts for FreeBSD, which
create a full mail server using vpopmail, courier, maildirs, spam/virus
filtering, webmail. If you are switching to Maildirs anyway, I recommend
trying it out.

http://www.tnpi.biz/internet/mail/toaster/

-Rafi