I’m setting up a site to cater from web based email.

Has anyone had any experience with this?

My question is how many users can you have on one dedicated server? Just say a basic configuration 2gig P4 with 512mb and 40 gig 7200 drive. How many users could I have on that one box, keeping in mind they are all over the world and won’t log in all at once.

I understand this is hard to say as is a dynamic environment and many variables. Just need some idea or experience.

I would say you should easily be able to put upwards of 500-1000 users on their, if not more. Depends on how much storage space you want to give them, etc.

It also depends greatly on the mail server. Mail servers have to be designed very carefully to use resources/threads appropriately. Some do it well, some do a very bad job. Research carefully.

Over 1000
How many user yahoo or hotmail put in one box....

If this box is just serving webmail... you might want to avoid using apache, as it's going to be bloated for what you'll be using it for. I'd try to find webmail software that acts as its own, minimal web server.

Then you can probably have a couple hundred people checking their mail at a time, and thousands of users.

Webmail is nasty business on the server side of things. I use Squirrel Mail over SSL for web-based email. PHP coupled with SSL can raise your load average in a hurry when you've got only a couple of people using the server at the same time.

Overall, you'll need a large server (I believe). Lots of CPU speed and RAM for the webmail and beefy HD's for the mail itself.

Of course, having said all that, I have no idea how many users you could fit on the server you've got listed.

On one machine I have .. only 12 email users, but these are heavy-use users that are on mailing lists and use Spam Filtering software. So midday monday, and it seems like a lot more users than 12.

If you want to be sneaky, call up Sendmail Inc. or anyone who sells commercial email solutions, and ask them what kind of server you'd need to host 'x' amount of people with their software. They may give you some useful information.

Thanks for your help.... I will need to have 400 users or there abouts.... So the info was great.

If it starts to slow I can get another box ehhh...:)