I am the president of the New Leaf Foundation. We have decided to push forward a project to create a free web based email service that donates all profits (after running costs etc) to environmental and social justice causes worldwide.

We are currently negotiating funding but require quotes to further this process. Frontend and Backend design has been donated and we are told that we will need a dedicated UNIX server.

We have set a target of 10,000 users for the first year. If each user is allocated 3mb for their account. How much (on average) will it cost us to run this service per month?

I do not have any experience with hosting and do not understand this field. Will bandwith etc require much more funding???

If I have been too vague, sorry. I do not know exactly what I should be asking.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Regards,
Marcus

Are you going to use the webmail for providing webmail acounts (i.e hotmail.com) or you going to provide a service as anyone can login to check their mails (i.e mail2web.com)?

if you going for "hotmail" solution then the 3mb estimate is not enough. most of the service provide 6mb as standrad. some even more. and these type of solutions are lot on the net today.

but the "mail2web" solution seems to be a good there are not many of them.

regarding the bandwidth and server, go for a server with much bandwidth as possible, i seen some provide up to 450GB/mo for $150-200/mo. It will be enough for your mail service.

and the server to be secured as much as possible since the spamming is a big risk for your mailservice.

Good luck.

If you are going to run a public mail service I would recomend you to keep away from idea of giving SMTP/POP3 access (big risk!) because there are spammers around.
Web Space for each user: I think you should make it around 5mb - I'm pretty sure and I know that not everyone is using full 5mb ;) So 2-3 HDDs will be enough.. I'd recomend SCSI to prevent 100% server load.
But first of all I'd recomend you to talk with a hosting company where you'll buy server about your idea.

Sorry for my BAD english and good luck to you! ;)

Mail servers do weird things at certain user volumes. 10,000 is a lot of users. You should consider a distributed mail server solution. This would entail a web server for the front end and a mail server for the backend. There are canned solutions like mirapoint that will give you an all in one solution.

If you go with a dedicated server have a plan to upgrade at 1000, 3000, 6000 and 10000.