Re: IMAP mail for heavy users
I would highly recommend IMAP, and Maildir would be a great choice.
I'm using qmail delivering to Maildir format, with IMAP access provided by
courier-imap. Couldn't have been easier to setup, and has great
performance. I had been using cyrus, but I found it harder to set up, and
more annoying to maintain.
I haven't tried maildir with exim, so I can't comment on that. If that's
easy to get going, then your approach should work great.
-Tupshin
----- Original Message -----
From: "Sanjeev Gupta" <ghane@dotxtra.com>
To: <debian-isp@lists.debian.org>
Sent: Sunday, September 23, 2001 9:40 PM
Subject: IMAP mail for heavy users
> Folks,
>
> The question of having mail solutions that scale to many users is often
> discussed, I have a variation.
>
> I am setting up a Mail Server for our company, with users distributed,
> some of them on slow dial-ups. Total number of users is under 50, in 3
> domains. My current method is using Jeremy Reed's patched gnu-pop3d for
> virtual addresses, and exim. I also offer users IMP (horde) to read
> mail while travelling.
>
> Because users often have multiple machines (one in Singapore, one in HK,
> and a laptop), I set up aliases, eg: mail to ghane goes to ghane,
> ghane-hk, and ghane-trav. I set up a POP account on each PC, and voila,
> I can read mail from all places. Users are happy.
>
> I am now thinking of switching to IMAP for users, mainly to help when
> lines drop on slow connections (POP starts again from Message 1), and to
> enable multiple PCs to view the mailbox on server. Added bonus: Sent
> Mail is viewable from all locations too, stopping the practice of BCC:
> me that users resort to. Virtual name@domain will deliver to a real
> user, which the person reading logs in as, abc@xyz.com -> abcxyz , so
> IMAP support for Virtual domains is not required.
>
> Other data: number of users, low, will not cross 100 anyway for another
> couple of years. Usage patterns, heavy. Users think nothing of sending
> 3MB attachments. This scares me, as my experience is that a 100MB inbox
> will slow startup considerably.
>
> Hence pointers required:
>
> 1
> Should I deliver to maildir? Will IMAP access be faster in this case,
> with a few hudred mails and a few hunded MB?
>
> 2
> I like exim, any reason not to use it?
>
> 3
> I could deliver to MySQL, which is running on the box, I just don't
> understand it, and I would like to stick to a known format when
> something goes wrong.
>
> 4
> Cyrus? Courier?
>
> 5
> What could users use to change their passwords, or vacation messages? I
> persume they could use IMP to read and deply while travelling.
>
> 6
> And finally: Is there any standard to sync or replicate address books?
>
> Thanks a ton for reading this.
>
> --
> Sanjeev Gupta
>
> PS: Secondary MX available for "personal" domains, I have a LARGE spool
> disk, and as long as you are up once in a while, I could even bump up
> the life of mails in spool beyond 5d. Ditto Primary/Secondary DNS for
> personal domains of list members.
>
>
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