OT - Scalable email server solution needed

[DAve]

Chris Shenton wrote:
> robert <bsd at bathnetworks.com> writes:
> 
>> Have a look at qmail, It is very scalable and well supported with
>> various sites and mailing lists. Iv'e been using it for well over a year
>> now.
> 
> Most important thing, IMHO, is uptime.  If you use the Maildir mailbox
> format you can put it on a solid NFS server like a NetApp and front it
> with any number of MTAs and IMAP servers.  Maildir is NFS-safe. 
> If a (used) netApp is too expensive for you, the same approach still
> keeps your complicated services off your most critical file server.
> 
> I used qmail-ldap (qmail with LDAP for virtualization) and a handfull
> of 1U SMTP/IMAP/POP/Squirrelmail servers. Each server had a local
> read-only replica of the LDAP data sync'd from the LDAP master.  Zero
> downtime in well over a year, even with taking individual boxes down
> (one at a time) for upgrades and such.
> 
> You could also look at Vpopmail virtualization for qmail. I've not
> tried to scale that across multiple boxes so I don't know how you'd
> replicate the account info.

Vpopmail can use a SQL store for account info. Like you we have several 
1U SMTP/IMAP/POP/Squirrelmail toasters running with all mail stored on a 
common NFS server. Which also is home to SQL for vpopmail, and for 
spamd. I have the NFS server (mail store is Raid5) on a second 1 gb 
network. Maildir delivery and SQL lookups are very very fast, even under 
a heavy load.

2+ years with the only issue being disk failure on the OS mirror of the 
toasters. I can recommend it.

DAve

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