Re: [cobalt-users] Two email servers for one domain

[Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Zhang Shiping wrote:

> I have 2000 email customers of the same domain. I want
> 1000 accounts on the 1st email server and another 1000
> on the 2nd server. The reasone is simple, one server
> cannot cope with 2000 users.

Please don't tell that to some servers we maintain; they handle email
for in the neighborhood of 5,000 users.

Of course they're NOT RaQ4s <smile>.

> This can expand to three or more servers. I'm just
> curious how yahoo.com, aol.com, msn.com do this. They
> cannot make 30,000,000 users on ONE server, right?

Well, they can... but they don't <smile>.

For outbound they have one url, pointing to multiple servers (IP#s)
using roundrobin DNS.

For inbound they use multiple MX records to spread incoming email, often
writing it to one large disk system.

For reading the inbound mail the again use roundrobin DNS to point their
users to one of multiple systems, again reading from the same large disk
system.

At least that's how the people I know who do it, do it.  But beware; NFS
all by itself isn't suitable for the record locking needed to make this
work.

Jeff
-- 
Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Linux and Cobalt/Sun/RaQ Consulting
nobaloney.net, P. O. Box 52672, Riverside, CA  92517
voice: +1 909 778-9980  *  fax: +1 909 548-9484