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Infrastructure for One Million Email Accounts?

Posted by Cliff on from the better-have-good-spam-filters dept.

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?"

3 of 1,216 comments (clear)

  1. Re:POP? by mre5565 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    A million users and they want POP3? Add a gun and a single bullet to your administration requirements.
    No doubt a well deseved +5 for humor, but for those of us less in the know (and a chance at another +5 for informative), what is so bad about POP3? Thx.
  2. Re:Obviously by kryonD · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Or maybe this is a legitimate cry for help from EDS who duped the US Navy into thinking they could actually outsource IT on the exact scale that the poster is talking about. Mind you, no one has ever provided ubiquitous support for an organization as large as the Department of the Navy, but they somehow convinced congress that they could do it for $6B dollars.

    Just so you know. Most of us out in South East Asia refer to NMCI (Navy-Marine Corps Intranet) as the Not Mission Capable Intranet.

    --
    I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause. --Dostoevsky
  3. Re:NO GMAIL by Denis+Lemire · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Definately agree on point 9. I maintain a mail server of over 2,000 users. Currently running Qmail with the following patches:

    chkuser-2.0.8b-release.tar.gz
    doublebounce-trim.patch
    netqmail-1.05-tls-20050329.patch
    outgoingip.patch
    qmail-smtpd-auth-0.31.tar.gz
    qmail-smtpd-auth-close3.patch
    qmail-smtpd_gmfcheck.patch
    qmail-spf-rc5.patch

    Most of these patches require hand editing the sources and Makefiles to successfuly merge them all into the stock qmail or netqmail base. Lots of manually reading through *.rej files to make it all work.

    In order to simplify new installations I've created my own personal CVS repository for my Qmail sources. I commit changes to the tree whenever a new patch comes out with functionality I need. Hence on a new install I simply check out my custom tree and compile.

    The initial work was a royal pain in the ass, however, once it is all up and running the stability and performance has been excellent.