I want to extend my website with a webbased hotmail-like e-mail service. The mailserver specs are: Celeron 500, 128mb, ... is this enough?

How many e-mails can this (any) server manage per day? What's better/faster, pop or imap?
Anybody knows a good script (php)? SquirrelMail?

Or is it better doing it the mysql way which means only webmessages like private messages... (but with a real e-mail address -> importing the mails into the mysql db). Anybody knows a good script??

Thanks

Originally posted by comram
I want to extend my website with a webbased hotmail-like e-mail service. The mailserver specs are: Celeron 500, 128mb, ... is this enough?

It's enough until it isn't enough. Will it handle 100 users? Yep. 200? Yep. 300? Yep. Hotmail? Nope.

I don't know anyone that runs a service like this that I could refer you to, but I'd say that the script will play a crucial role in the limit of the server. Hungry script = server crawling with many users (obviously).

e.g. max. 10'000 Mails per day?


--
I don't know how much cpu/ram a pop/imap access uses, perhaps anybody knows?

We are planning to implement a freemail service for a website with ~400 members.
We have a server (Celeron 400, 128mb) with Qmail, Apache, PHP, MySQL installed.
I found a great Webmail, it looks like Outlook. It's free (GPL) and you can find it under http://www.ractive.ch/popper/ .

I think your server can handle about 1000 mailboxes...

- domi

Originally posted by comram

How many e-mails can this (any) server manage per day? What's better/faster, pop or imap?


POP/IMAP for webmail? Are you confused, or am I? :)

every user should have access to our server over pop/imap.

i think these are two different protocols to receive mails from the server. now its the question which of them is faster?

Why dont you use a free service like everyone.net?

You could offer @yourdomain.com email address

DJ

Originally posted by DJ

Why dont you use a free service like everyone.net?

You could offer @yourdomain.com email addressDJ There are many, many reasons -- especially if you want to do this on the scale comram is talking about -- to run webmail on your own server instead of through everyone.net. Probably the three biggest are: everyone.net's skaky availabilty, everyone.net's terribly slow response time, and the lack of control you'll have over the ads you'll display if you're using everyone.net.

Originally posted by pyng
POP/IMAP for webmail? Are you confused, or am I?
Ummm... you are? :) Typically (meaning not always) that's how a webmail system works, by accessing a pop or imap mailbox.

By the way, comram, I'd recommend you look at Endymion MailMan (which I've found to be pretty easy to set up), or their more powerful Sake. The major difference with Sake is that it uses the Java Server API instead of CGI so it's much faster and more scalable.

There's also Winsite's CWMail; they also produce NetAuth which you can use to automatically create user accounts. Actually, you could use NetAuth in combination with any webmail program, not necessarily CWMail.

I've also heard good things about Gossamer Threads, but haven't looked at in detail.

If you're looking for a free script, that's a different matter. These are kinda pricey.

[Edited by JayC on 03-27-2001 at 08:08 AM]