e-mail server farm question

[Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC]

On May 23, 2006, at 1:35 AM, Evren Yurtesen wrote:

> 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.
>

I am not sure anyone was talking about distributing 1 person's mail  
across separate machines.  The discussion seemed to be how to handle  
large amounts of mail spread out across machines, which maildir helps  
with as you can have one or more file servers and lots of consumers  
(imap/pop) and deliverers (mta) accessing those maildirs on your file  
servers.  Combine with a backend database of some sort (we use an  
ldap db that includes the path for a specific accounts mail) and voilá.

Chad


---
Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC
Your Web App and Email hosting provider
chad at shire.net