Hi, I'm working in an ISP and we have several clusters of smtp servers handling customer's email needs.The email flow looks like this. For incoming mails, they are being received by two load-balanced smtp running sendmail with a patch applied to it for it to be able to querry a mysql database. This database is custom made, AFAIK, and it contains only 1 table, the first column contains actual email accounts ([EMAIL PROTECTED]), while the second one contains their email address with some more informations appended to it such as [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED] This two columns are used by sendmail in determining which smtp host the email should be send, whether it must be forwarded to an antivirus/spam server or not. Now, if the email is forwarded to the cleaning server, those cleaning servers also are running sendmail which also does the same thing (querry the mysql database, using the third column which contains account information for it to know the final destination, because we have several smtp/pop servers for various domains.
I have already successfully implemented an all-in-one(pop/imap/smtp/antivirus/spam) qmail-ldap setup but I admit, that server is way less complicated than the setup we have in the new company I'm working for. The systems are running on Solaris and BSDI platform and we are looking forward to migrating them into newer, powerful intel. Now, for the most significant part, have you already come up with the same setup as I described above, probably have patched qmail-ldap's smtp to process emails and querry the ldap directory to know which smtp host it must forward the emails? How about running a proxy pop servers using qmail?. In our setup, clients are downloading their mails with via pop through "Pop Proxy", the name of the application I think... The actual pop3 servers are running "Post.Office3.5.3" which we also are thinking of migrating to another application. Other admin also complained that they're having a hard time finding out how to extract user accounts from the Post.Office database because of lack of documentation and support. The software is way too old (1998). Do you happen to use one of this systems before? Do you recommend the built-in qmail-pop3d or some other pop3 servers? (which one?) The postfix-qmail debate is also a minor issue here. other admins do prefer postfix. Can you give me an idea of dealing with this issue? The old email format of our customers are in mailbox. It is possible to migrate it to maildir format, right? Lastly, we are planning to improve our email service by increasing the mailbox storage quota of each customer. Do you have any idea how does gmail or yahoo provide such huge email space (2gb) for free? Do they use a very high tech compression program or are they just having a lot of money to buy so many hard drives? Thanks for the time! -jay __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
