Re: Mail servers for large numbers of users
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far way, someone said...
> I am about to build a (group of?) e-mail server for
> a large number of users... more than 65536.
Ooh... that's quite a few :)
> Using Debian of course. :)
A noble cause!
> It should include SMTP and IMAP. Users do not need to have login
> accounts. Probably I will be using Potato.
>
> What should I start with?
Either exim or postfix, definitely - they're very easy to configure. I've
not had any experience with anything else.
> Are there good open sourced MTA and IMAP servers that do not operate
> on system password accounts? (so I don't have to create 60000+
> accounts)
The MTA won't give you any problems - they typically don't care about the
password database. However, here's another reason why you don't want to
base the accounts on the password database: Linux's password database
can't (as it is in Debian) can't deal with more than slightly less than
65536 users. You'd do good to look into something that can use LDAP (or
something like that) for authentication.
> For now I will be trying to distribute the accounts on more than 1
> server, set-up the DNS to have more than 1 MX, and forward the mails
> internally through SMTP for non-existent local users.
It might be easier to use round-robin DNS for mail.yourdomain.com.
> Which MTA is good for this purpose?
Any of them will do.
[...]
--
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Phil Brutsche pbrutsch@creighton.edu
"There are two things that are infinite; Human stupidity and the
universe. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
Reply to: