I have an IBM P3 with 512 Mb 60 Gb 7200 rpm Hdd.

How many email account should I have if I don't want to stress too much the CPU? The server is not a mail server, it uses also some MySQL Db and hosts websites.

Thanks,

Marco

Depends on your MTA and OS I suppose..

my guesstimate is :

if you are using something light and powerful like qmail or postfix on FreeBSD then you can probably send and receive about 200,000 emails per day [conservatively] using about 128 MB of RAM

If your web sites and mySQL can live on the rest of the RAM then you can work out the number of mailboxes yourself

cheers
Balaji

So 3000 email account sounds resonable on an average server?

The server uses RH 7.2.

Marco

Oh yes..

3000 to 4000 looks reasonable to me, assuming your mail users are not attachment freaks or bulk-emailers

Cheers
Balaji

yeah i would say about 4000 should work no problem.

3-4 thousand seems reasonable.

For better scalability and speed, I suggest you

1.) use maildir format
2.) use postfix or qmail for better speed and security (some people still prefer courier and cyrus - no prob)
3.) ldap, mysql or any other authorization scheme (not standard unix!)
4.) filter out all ports, except 110 (pop3), imap (143) and 25 (SMTP)
5.) tune kernel to increase max concurrent open file value
6.) set-up correctly mail spool and other partitions to avoid dos/spam attacks that may easily bring down your e-mail server

..

I hope I didn't get flamed a lot :) I hope this helps you

Thanks! Your post is really useful :)

Marco