Leland Jackson wrote:
Whil Hentzen (Pro*) wrote:
My preference is to leave it to the professionals. While I host my own
sites for the education, convenience and humbling learning
experiences,
Most of the professionals only offer pop3, which mean the mail is
downloaded to the client's computer. How many of your client's
computers have redundancy built in or are backed up daily?
Its not a difficult job to back up a mail server running imap. In
this way you are doing a backup of everyones mail at once. Just start
up Nautilus, and create a directory called Mail_backup. Each day,
using Nautilus , create a subdirectory off Mail_backup with a name of
the current date like "2006-07-06". Then, using Nautilus, browse to
/var/spool/imap and click on copy folder. Then, using Nautilus ,
browse to /Mail_backup/2006-07-06 and click on paste. That's it, all
done.
For even greater convenience create a crontab job to run daily to
perform this little task. For greater security create the backup to a
nfs mounted partition on another computer within the network, so the
backup is on a separate computer from the original computer.
One other thing I forgot to mention is the majority of mail servers run
within local networks of banks, Corporations, Schools, Hospitals,
Non-profits, etc, so speed in this scenarios is tops, since connections
within a local network will be much faster than anything running over
the Internet. The clients in the local network would use a local 1P
address, or NebBIOS name to connect to their mail server like
192.168.1.52 or mfs_server1. This mean you don't need huge amounts of
Internet bandwidth to run an efficient mail server, since all mail sent
to the server going out over the Internet, and all mail received from
the Internet to be delivered, is local to the School, Corporation,
Hospital, Non-profit, etc.
This is different form your typical ISP, where their customers receiving
and sending email to and from the mail server are remote.
Regards,
LelandJ
Bragging rights, too. "Yeah, I've got a half dozen servers, redundant
T1s from two providers, all in my basement..." is today's equivalent
of the local tough in levis with a pack of cigarettes rolled up in
the sleeve of his white t-shirt, talking about the 410 horses with
<fill in all sorts of gearhead car talk here> under the hood of his
57 chevy.
:)
I don't generate my own electricity or purify my own
water; I leave that to professionals who understand how to engineer
facilities that deliver 99.9999% of the time.
Name one. :)
My T1 has been on 100% of the time since I got it four or five years
ago. The local power company, on the other hand, blips on us every 3
to 6 months with nary an excuse or logical reason.
I'd suggest you weigh
the benefits and risks of web and (especially) mail hosting and
determine how robust an engineering plant and guarantee you want to
provide. There are sites that provide hosted mail service and will
even let you private brand it (with a reasonable markup, of course)
and that would be my preference.
The trick is to find that place who really can deliver five 9s. I've
used two different hosting companies, big names, folks you would
think have figured it all out, and I've had entire days of being
down. I'm a little nervous of trying out yet another company....
Whil
[excessive quoting removed by server]
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