Hello

A customer has asked me for a quote on a mailserver account capable of handling 6000 mailboxes (Max 4M per mailbox) including webmail.

As I do not have experience with so many email boxes on asingle server I look for some advice on it.

1- Considering that some users will not use their account very much but others may use it frequently (some with Pop3 and some with webmail), what kind of server do you recommend for such a project?

2- If this will not make much load I will prefer to use remaining power and space for some reseller accounts or simple hosting accounts. Then which control panel will be better.

3- What kind of webmail has more features but makes less load :)

4- And finally I need to write a program that automatically creates mailboxes (reads a list of emailbox names from a text file or a MySQL table and creates those email boxes.)

I think it should be possible under cpanel (I will just add entries to passwd file ? )

Which control panel is easier for this purpose.

Regards,
Mac

6000 mail boxes means 6000 people using your site. That very high traffic and email is a frequently checked thing. SCSI would deal with the disk useage a lot better than IDE would. A 36GB drive would be good, considering you will need up to 24GB for user data alone (assuming you dont want to oversell) plus room for the OS, swap, and the other basics. Putting those on sepearate drives from the data would help also.

take a look at matt.simerson.net , he has a pretty good recipe for a mail toaster.. pop3, imap, webmail, etcl.. using inter7.com's QmailAdmin, and SQwebmail..

I used this for a long time and never complained. I had it setup with 2 loadbalanced mail servers which used a shared raid array.

server configs: p2 450, 512MB ram, 9g scsi, 2 nic cards

All account info was stored in mysql , which was replicated to the other server.

Before i moved them to different servers, i think it handled some 2000 domains and 10000 users.

the raid array had 10 9g SCSI in raid 1,5

Originally posted by anantatman
the raid array had 10 9g SCSI in raid 1,5

wow, thats a whole bunch of redundancy you got there. :D

Mac,

If it is non-corporate client [meaning no large Office documents as attachments] you can easily put 6000 email boxes on a P3 512 mb RAM with 2 x 60 GB IDE hard disks. [if you use it exclusively for mail that is]

If it is corporate, depends on their usage.

Largely depends on the OS and the MTA rather than mere hardware config

The config I gave can send and receive 200,000 - 300,000 non-attachment mails a day!

Email me if you need more info

Cheers
Balaji

My mail server is a P3 256 MB RAM with 1 40 gb IDe [remote back up thru rsync] it does 6000 mails a day and the load is hardly over 0.05

If you install Zend optimizer and compile Apache with php you can run squirrelmail fairly fast

Originally posted by Acronym BOY


wow, thats a whole bunch of redundancy you got there. :D


i kinda needed it , it supported mail for 10 servers worth of web hosting clients.. couldn't risk anything less

Balaj and Anantatman,

Thank you for your advice. This is a directory site which contains information about 6000 bsinesses. They are planning to give an email box to each of them.

Webserver will be on another computer and I think most of those 6000 will not use their email boxes on directory site.

Anyway it seems I need to dedicate this server to email hosting only.

Thank ou again,
Mac