using Cyrus was Re: [CentOS] Re: Planning Mail Server (with low resources)

Wed Dec 7 17:36:16 UTC 2005
John Hinton <webmaster at ew3d.com>

Feizhou wrote:

> Aleksandar Milivojevic wrote:
>
>> Quoting Feizhou <feizhou at graffiti.net>:
>>
>>> a courier-imap/dovecot box would only just have to access a SAN and 
>>> that is all there is to clustering. Multiple courier-imap/dovecot 
>>> boxes hitting a database for user info and mailbox location and then 
>>> hitting the san for the files. simple.
>>
>>
>>
>> I think SAN is way out of reach of somebody who is left to build mail 
>> server for
>> 2000 users with only 40GB drive.
>
>
Actually... I'm left wondering if this mailserver is really meant to be 
an IMAP only mailserver or just an IMAP capable mailserver? Most users 
like to use POP and keep their mail locally but have the option to use a 
Webmail program when away. If that is the case, there are a lot of 
things talked about that really are pretty outlandish. Heck, a lot of 
ISPs still have a 5meg quota on their users! Yup, one of the larger ones 
in this area defaults to that.. a phone call is all it takes to get it 
raised, but I can see their point. If you give them 100megs it'll get 
filled up. Many users don't even use email except on hotmail or yahoo. 
Spammers' dictionaries are constantly finding non-mail user accounts on 
my boxes. Mother Nature abhors an unfilled harddisk.

Also, if the school can only afford to use an old machine like this, how 
much 'time' can they afford to put into a highly customized system? 
There's the learning curve..... and as well, many times the 'person 
responsible' changes frequently in a college setting. Having something 
which someone else can take over is an important issue. "Simple" is 
relative... once you've done it five or so times.. yeah, it's simple. :)

Many of us have to know something about a LOT, and simply don't have the 
time to know a LOT about something. Like having a good grasp of 
everything from setting up webservers, DNS, email, to building 
sites/pages understanding some of the programming languages to doing 
tech calls for folks whose "Outlook is stuck", who many times don't know 
the difference between Outlook and MSIE! This is said just to point out 
the idea of thinking about the 'level' of the posters inquiry and situation.

I think we could easily handle AOL's, MSN's and Yahoo's email with what 
has been discussed... but it might take more that a 40G drive... ;)

John Hinton