Re: [cobalt-developers] email accounts

[Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Anthony Noe wrote:

> Thanks for the info.  But actually, the clients just asked if I could handle
> up to(in perfect world) 60,000.  Is that out of range of one cobalt?  What
> type of machine(s) and software would be best to handle that?

We've built some fairly large mail systems, but never for more than
one-tenth this many accounts.  For handling a large number of email
accounts we generally build servers using qmail (with a lot of custom
tweaks) and pop and imap servers designed to work with qmail.  We use a
separate file-system; for 60,000 accounts each with a 20 megabyte
mailstore, you'd need a one-terabyte file system (1,000 gigabytes).

While a large single server could theoretically handle this (with a
separate file system, of course) as long as you didn't have webmail, I'd
go for multiple server cluster with simple (DNS-based) load-balancing
and NAS (Network Attached Storage), especially if you need webmail.

Are you thinking of backing up a 1.2 terrabyte file system?  Now we're
really talking money.

My guess is you're in the neighborhood of a few hundred thousand
dollars.  And to make sure data transit isn't a bottleneck you'll have
to have a pretty good guestimate of how much mail the system would
move.  A T-1 would be anywhere from overkill to seriously underpowered,
depending on how much email was actually moving through the system.


Jeff
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