>I am designing a network to cater for a very large number of users in
>excess of 500 000 users. I thought of having a master server running NT
>with the SQL user database which would be shared by two or more Imail
>servers. These would load balance users accessing the site via the net.
We know of only one Imail server of that size, it was 250 K accounts on one
server, with 25 gigabyte traffic per day. IIRC, he had a quad xeon
monster, and it was using under 10% of its capacity.
He had a big "helper": his Imail machine "sent all outgoing mail through a
gateway". ie, Imail dumped outgoing mail at LAN speed on a Unix machine
that served as a mail hub/gateway and Unix did the nasty business of
delivering mail to remote mail servers, offloading a bunch of work from Imail.
>My problem is I don't know how to achieve this!
For sharing the load between Imail servers, you can't do it, afaik. Even
with external database, each Imail machines knows what accounts are "its"
accounts. so you could have 250k accounts on one Imail server and 250K
accounts on the other:
mailone.hbic.co.za
mailtwo.hbic.co.za
(Imail peering is only for incoming SMTP traffic. Any peer server will
accept mail for any peer in the group and then relay the mail to the
correct peer where the mail account resides. (this has nothing to do with
external use databases) To pickup their mail via POP3, IMAP, or web
messaging, the users must know which Imail server, "one" or "two" above,
has their mailbox.)
I suggest that you use Imail only for POP3, web msging, and SMTP AUTH
servers, while off-loading all of Imail's Internet traffic to mail hubs, as
I depict here: http://imgate.meiway.com/IMGate-dual.cfm
500,000 users will have plenty of spam, so you'll need the best anti-spam
defenses. You will also need "content-filtering" for anti-virus defense,
both in and out.
Len
Len
http://BIND8NT.MEIway.com: ISC BIND 8 installable binary for NT4
http://IMGate.MEIway.com: Build free, hi-perf, anti-spam mail gateways
Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html
to be removed from this list.
