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Infrastructure for One Million Email Accounts?
cfsmp3 asks: "I have been asked to define the infrastructure for the email system for a huge company, which fed up of Exchange, wants to replace their entire system with something non-Microsoft. I have done this before, but not for anything of this scale. Suppose you are given a chance to build from scratch an email system that has to support around one million accounts. Some corporate, some personal, some free. POP, IMAP, webmail, etc are requirements. The system must scale perfectly, 99.9% uptime is expected... where would you start?"
I'd start by submitting a question to Ask Slashdot.
gmail.google.com
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
bashing my head up against a desk.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
I think he is the consultant.
A million users and they want POP3? Add a gun and a single bullet to your administration requirements.
I think they want an acutal company email. so the email reads john@company.com.
If that's too rich for ya, how about gmail invites? Slashdotters could come up with a million of those I bet.
Say hello to my little sig.
I have several gmail accounts I can give you. Once you have serveral of these you can assign gmail accounts to the rest of your users. :)
I bet Google would be willing to sell you a solution.
The mail "databases" are spread among Domino servers
...
Yeah, but we all know what happens when one of these Domino servers falls over
> ...and I'm going to guess that a large part of that decision is because IBM owns the Lotus product line?
Of course! Why would we use a competitor's product which is little more than a virus/trojan processing center? Sure we have to pay MS for using Windows, Office and some other tools but if we own an e-mail/collaboration/messaging software division that can scale to the size we need, might as well eat our own dog food.
Well, he seems aware that he doesn't, in fact, know everything.
... Is anyone wondering what's going on at Microsoft right now?
It starts with a slashdot geek working in the email department spitting up his coffee, followed by a few rumors which make it up to a guy in accounting and customer service, followed by frantic management emails, including some inappropriate language, from Steve and Bill. Then a few good geeks start tracing who this cfsmp3 guy is and try to trace him to a company while the salesreps begin coldcalling any customers running around 1 million customers.
And Microsoft will botch it because they have no experience in cowtowing and bootlicking, which are important skills for any company who wants to humbly keep its customers.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Don't get me wrong. Notes isn't just a crappy E-mail client. It's also a crappy database access client that provides user-definiable forms which can be used to populate rows in the database. When you start getting a LOT of rows, the performance really goes to shit unless you replicate the database down to your local hard drive.
Rather than the Notes based solution, I would suggest an old 386 running BSD and Sendmail. That'd save you a lot of pain in the long run, versus dealing with Notes.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
so he can't be management...
Those newfangled "real numbers" are nothing but bullet-point creeping featuritis. Integers, on the other hand, have been around since at least Kernighan & Richie. They do one thing and do it well. Keep true to the Unix philosophy! Real numbers in information technology? Just say NO.
This is...
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Yeah. Well, if 1 minute, 26 seconds is "almost" 15 minutes, anyway.
I read Usenet for the articles.
I think you mean "What do you mean our ***CARRIER LOST***"
You used to work for NASA right?
From ASR ( http://home.xnet.com/~raven/Sysadmin/ASR.Quotes.ht ml )
... while talking to bloat.example.com.:
Re : Mail Transfer Agents
Qmail : a small office of neatly dressed clerks, delivering short clipped remarks to queries, and handling mail with a rude impersonality, except in the case of failiure where they let their hair down and have an after-hours beer and let you know about it, pointing to the pertinent header sections.
MMDF: A jumped up mailroom boy with a chip on his shoulder. Loves the bureaucracy and takes great pride in stamping "illegal address" in red ink on any mail it passes. Unpacks all the mail and repacks it in his own special envelopes before delivery to end users.
PP: MMDF gone mad with standards fever. Think "Brazil".
No, PP is... well, see, when it receives a letter, it chops it into small pieces, then translates bits of it using an English-Hungarian phrasebook and puts all the bits into various pigeon-holes. When it gets round to delivering the message, it collects all the bits, translates them back using a Hungarian-English phrasebook, tapes them together, and loses the letter. Some time later, you get a bounce message:
----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
----- Transcript of session follows -----
>>> RCPT To:
550 My hovercraft is full of eels
PP is John Cleese.
Sendmail: Shiva as a postman. Many arms delivering mail, dancing, taking drugs, destroying as it sees fit. Often makes creative changes to the mail for kicks, but ultimately can be persuaded to do anything with the right incantation...and that includes giving you other people's mail.
VMail: No experience yet, but I'd guess something like a wisened old man sitting on the porch outside the postoffice. Looks at everyone who passes by with deep suspicion, but turns out to be friendly and helpful once he realises you're not there to rob the place.
Micro$oft IMC: The Scarlet Pimpernel of postmen. Hard to find, impossible to order about, but every once in a while it saves a piece of mail from disaster. Sometimes even with it's head(ers) intact.
cc:Mail SMTPLINK: A 5 year old child left in charge of a large sorting office. Can't reach over the counter properly, can't handle more than one letter at once and has to go looking for a grownup whenever it wants to deliver to mail to other towns. Often opens parcels to look for shiney things inside then just delivers the wrapping paper onwards.
cc:mail UUCPLINK: an insane madman sitting in a box. Mail is thrown into a box where unknown things happen to it.. sometimes mail actually leaves the box.. usually to be delivered to the administrator of a totally unrelated postoffice and containing a complaint that the madman could not find the recipient in his dark box and would you please contact the person with the key of the box. Of course, the only way to reach that person is by mail and even if the box is opened the madman cannot be pursuaded to actually send mail to unknown addressees to the person with the key anyway...
Gus, Pete Bentley, Malcolm Ray, Perry Rovers
You're very angry and I appreciate that! I hope you equally appreciate hearing that your argument is a fucking failure because it fucking assumes that implementing a fucking scalable fuckfuckinging mail server reduces to a few fopen(); read(); fclose() calls.
Anyone who's actually done more than tried to fucking lecture somebody the fuck on why they're not using the right fucking approach to implefuckmenting a fucking cock ass fuck shit mail server would realize that if you don't use some sort of database back-end, you still end up creating data fuckstructures and cockindexes on top of this magical filesystem of yours, and fucking code to manipulate those fucking data structures, and code to update the fuck out of those data structures and fucking indexes, and fucking code to fucking partition the godly file system directories so they are fucking balanced, and lo and behold you've fucking implemented something that looks like a fucking database! The difference being, you wrote it so it's got newer and more interesting fucking bugs than My-fucking-SQL, but god fucking damn it, you used the FILE SYSTEM so eat a fuck!
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
Gmail is open to everyone now right....just sign up for 1,000,000 gmail accounts and go on vacation! Let the engineers at google do it.