On Apr 28, 2009, at 3:46 AM, Jan-Piet Mens wrote:
>>
>> We have a requirement for a mail server (SMTP receive, POP
>> collection,
>> IMAP not currently required) with a presence in 2 data centres
>
> Without having thought this out entirely, a database, say Mysql,
> placed
> on shared storage available from both data centres, could feed DBMail
> (http://www.dbmail.org/index.php?page=overview) from which your
> clients
> retrieve their POP messages.
> (http://www.dbmail.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=bigpicture)
>
> We've had rather good experience with MySQL on DRBD as shared storage,
> but large volumes of updates are a bit slow -- this won't affect you.
> No experience as yet with DBMail, although it sounds interesting.
We used DBMail 1.x for a client once and it was adequate.
v 2.x was a vast improvement. We since moved off to standard Courier
Maildirs as it was adequate to our purposes.
I know there are ISPs in Europe running tens of thousands of mailboxes
off of DBMail.
Make sure that if you use the InnoDB engine for your tables, you
specify the innodb_file_per_table option in your my.cnf
It makes doing a cleanup on the mail tables a LOT easier.
Mailboxes in a DB make a LOT of sense, IMO, but with the high amount
of churn, it requires special care and feeding.
The really nice thing about that kind of architecture is that you can
load balance the front end POP/IMAP connections into the backend
database
Brian
