Suggestions needed; mail server suggestions

[tleslie]

Disk I/O's per second on mail servers can be huge if you have a lot of
accounts.

One smart thing to do is to have the pop3 grab/staging area and the
sendmail incoming staging area (are you doing spam/virus detect),
as a RAM disk. 
I set up a sendmail once with a 300MB ram staging area for pop3'ing and
it had a huge impact.

also you might want to put a anti-spam device in front of your smtp/pop3
system , as spam can account 20-80% of email size, but given spam is
usually small, it can account for >50%-95% of your disk I/O's

I know in a ISP i run, I can see 100's of emails per second arrive,
and I know my disk system (would like to be) doing many 100's of I/O
second, as I didn't have a netapp or 14 drive 15Krpm raid disk system,
this was an issue.

One fast drive that had 4ms average seek ... thats only 250 head moves
per second, and a big email system , unless you do some magic,
like RAM drives, etc, is going to fall apart quick.

I guess the bottom line is, know matter what email system you use,
if you have hundreds of emails per second, and eventually all
have to make it to disk, there is huge disk I/O's, relatively small disk
throughput, but huge I/O's

In my case a barracuda in front of the smtp/pop3 saved the day,
just on shear spam kill alone.

-tl



On Mon, 2007-07-09 at 10:06 -0400, Madison Kelly wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
>    I've been using Sendmail for many years now, despite a few (aborted) 
> attempts to move to other systems. Until now it has served me well.
> 
>    Thing is though, the number of email addresses and domains I host has 
> been growing (and with luck, will continue to grow). My issue is that I 
> don't like needing to have a shell account for each email address. This 
> is insecure to a degree and makes backup and recovery more difficult.
> 
>    So I want to move to a SQL-based mail server. I want to let users use 
> their email address as their POP3 username, for simplicity.
> 
>    So what then, good TLUG'ers, would you suggest I look at? All I am 
> asking for is pointers, but recipes would be appreciated!
> 
>    Thanks all!
> 
> Madi
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