Is anyone aware of a good, non-biased review of the various mail storage
formats (MBX, MBOX, MAILDIR, etc...) and their relative
performance/reliability under a variety of loads?
I need to re-implement an ISP mail system for 20,000+ users, I need to
suppport both POP and IMAP, need a good webmail solution, and also need
this to be scalable as the userbase grows.
We are currently using Linux with the normal /var/spool/mail berkely
mailbox format, with users in passwd file (via NIS), and using the
standard RedHat POP/IMAP daemons. We have a temporary webmail solution
to which we are limiting access only to people that need it (becuase it
would kill the server if it was in general use)
The new systems will almost certainly be FreeBSD instead of Linux.
Unless there is some overwhelming reason to use somthing else, Exim is
still the choice for the MTA. I just need to figure out what POP/IMAP
daemons to use, what webmail solution to use, and how to be able to
scale this by adding servers either without NFS (??) or with NFS but
without any of the problems NFS often causes. Intertwined with choice of
daemons is the choice of mail storage format. We need to also support
'personal website' hosting, via
www.domain.com/~username URL's, so we
are still looking at keeping users in the passwd file for now (even
though it may be better for email use to have them elsewhere), unless
someone is aware of a solution for that that doesnt use the passwd file
(including ftp access to upload content)
