mail server recommendations?

[Chris Shenton]

Aristedes Maniatis <ari at ish.com.au> writes:

> We have sold Communigate Pro (http://www.ish.com.au/communigate) to
> customers with up to 30,000 accounts. Others run up to 100,000 on a
> single server, more in a cluster. It runs great on FreeBSD and that is
> the combination we usually recommend and use ourselves. It costs
> money, but you didn't say whether you wanted a free or commercial
> product. 

I plugged qmail-ldap in an earlier message, but in a previous
life^H^H^H^H job we deployed Communigate Pro (on Solaris)-: and it was
rock-solid and handled pretty heavy loads without burdening the server
much. Good responsive online tech support and bug-fixes, feature
additions.  IMHO their web gui's a bit ... uh... primitive, but it's
useable.

At another ISP we supported, we deployed Mirapoint mail appliances and
they were fine too, but I don't have much direct hands-on experience
with them.

Both are worthy commercial offerings, and I think better than most
other commercial alternatives. Check communigate's web for some
interesting tech-rag reviews and comparisons with other products.

I would definitely advocate some kind of fault-tolerant architecture,
whether it's tight clustering, loosely-coupled federation (qmail-ldap
with shared NFS mailstore), or whatnot.  Email's dead critical to
users and you can't afford downtime.  It's really sweet to be able to
take down one MTA/SMTP/POP/IMAP/LDAP box in the middle of the day for
an upgrade, and have no one notice.  :-)