e-mail server farm question

[Vulpes Velox]

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.