A friend of mine recently mentioned something to me about an enterprise-leve mailbox service for linux. Basically the purpose of the software would be to maintain mailboxes for many users without them actually having shell accounts on the server. It also stored email by having one file for every message instead of having the entire mailbox in one file. Does anyone on here have any idea what this software is? I really don't know anything about it, and my friend is gone now. thanks a bunch!

After doing some research, it seems that qmail will be good software for this problem. just thought I'd post in case anyone else was interested.

Vpopmail is the software package that would provide mailboxes for virtual users without shell accounts. Qmail stores mail in the Maildir format, which creates one file for each e-mail message. Other mail systems use mobx format, which uses one big file for all mail messages. This causes many problems such as mailbox corruption and issues backing up mail. Setting up a Qmail + Vpopmail system isn't too hard. A great installation guide can be found at http://www.qmailrocks.org/ And if you don't want to actually know what you're doing, you just want it to work: http://www.qmailtoaster.com/

Great info! This is exactly what i am looking for. Thanks so much!