Re: Mail Server Design

[Adam Aube <aaube01@baker.edu>]

Mariano Wahlmann wrote:

> I need some help, on designing a mail server solution (structure)

> I have two proposal:
> 
> 1- One big expensive server with 1 SCSI disk, two processors.
> 2- Several cheaps servers, dividing mailboxes across servers.

I would say go with (2). This system would have 3 parts:

1) Mail store server - mail store is in maildir format and shared using NFS
2) POP/IMAP server
3) SMTP server - also provides spam/virus filtering

Distributes the load, limits effects of a failure, and scales well. Just
make sure the mail store has some redundancy - either use one server with
redundant disks, or two servers in a cluster using drdb or some other live
replication tool.

Adam