e-mail server farm question

[Evren Yurtesen]

Vulpes Velox wrote:

> On Mon, 22 May 2006 11:54:02 -0500
> Kevin Kinsey <kdk at daleco.biz> wrote:
> 
> 
>>>At 07:17 AM 5/22/2006, Evren Yurtesen wrote:
>>>
>>>>Hello,
>>>>
>>>>I was wondering how does services like yahoo mail is storing
>>>>e-mails. Somehow the smtp server should know where to deliver
>>>>the mail inside the system and webmail should know from which
>>>>server to read it from.
>>>>
>>>>Does anybody have any practical ideas about how it is done?
>>>>
>>
>>Derek Ragona wrote:
>> > If you are using sendmail, as most FreeBSD users are, you can
>> > check the sendmail.org site for information on mail handling.
>> > There are a number of methods that depend on your setup.
>> >
>>
>>Well, it's pretty obvious that they aren't using a stock
>>SendMail:
>>
>># telnet mx2.mail.yahoo.com 25
>>Trying 67.28.113.72...
>>Connected to mx2.mail.yahoo.com.
>>Escape character is '^]'.
>>220 mta309.mail.re4.yahoo.com ESMTP YSmtp service ready
>>
>>Short of finding an article written by someone 'in the know',
>>or an answer for someone like that, we can only guess.  I'd
>>probably start with guessing a big DB on a large SAN;
>>which pretty much negates the "which server to read from"
>>question (up to a point).  Everything else is pretty
>>academic.  SMTP, IMAP, POP.
> 
> 
> Maildir makes it easy to distribute it across multiple machines as
> well.

What do you mean exactly? distributing 1 user's mails into seperate
machines? I didnt understand how Maildir helps to this actually.
Thanks,
Evren