LARGE scale email

[Jason Clinton]

On Mon, 2004-09-20 at 09:21, Garrett Goebel wrote:
> Phoenician wrote:
> > 
> > Just out of curiosity, what would people recommend for large
> > scale email? (what distro and application)

Distro is irrelevant unless you want it to hold your hand. Both of the
Enterprise distro's have Wizards that allow you to set up an email
server. More specifically though, with the enterprise versions you can
do things like LVM and LDAP in a nice GUI interface.

> 1,500 mailboxes, 350-400 domains. Okay, but can you be more specific
> on "large scale"?   

No matter how specific, the only FOSS answer to this question capable of
handling this kind of load is Cyrus IMAP or POP with account data stored
in LDAP. Also, I hope that hardware RAID5 + a backup solution is
obvious.

> What Mail Transfer Agents (MTA's) are you familiar with? Postfix?
> qmail? Sendmail?

I think you'll find that you will want to use Postfix in order to check
LDAP for the existance of the account before delivery. Most of the
HOWTO's for this specific problem out there use Postfix. SuSE Enterprise
9 comes with Postfix configurator. However, there are /many/ ways to do
this. LMTP is the method by which Cyrus receives the mail from your MTA
and it, too, may reject the incoming mail. Also check out Cyrus Sieve
documentation.

> What Win32 MTA are you transferring from? Exchange?

"IMAP suck" tools can handle transition no matter the source.

> Do you have calendaring concerns which need to be addressed?

FOSS IMAP servers are thusly incapable of handling calendaring. However,
there is a SuSE product called OpenExchange that can turn
Cyrus+Postfix+Apache+WebDAV in to a Exchange emmulator and is somewhat
compatible with ICAL (IIRC). So you can continue to use LookOut on
Windows, but it's pricy because there's a proprietary piece of client
software (MAPI provider) that must run on each of the Windows boxes. I
suggest running a seperate WebDAV server and distributing the Mozilla
Sunbird Calendaring Client. Evolution can also ICAL. But, that's a whole
different project.

> Mailing lists?

Mailman is compatible with all transport systems.

> What DNS servers are you familiar with? Bind? djbdns?

All he needs is an MX record. Why does he need to know all of that?

> What do you currently use to filter spam?

HOWTO's include SpamAssassin and Amavis setup instructions. No big deal.
Amavis (antivirus) is almost certainly something you want to configure
if Windows is in the network.

> I'd say use look for the "hardened" version of whatever distributions
> you are most familiar with. Failing that, take a gander at
> http://www.bastille-linux.org/. Read the hardening documentation
> twice. When you decide to stray from the documentation, slap yourself
> with a clue-by-four. Then subscribe to a mailing list or visit a forum
> specifically targeted for your hardened distro, read their faq, and
> ask for advice there.

Whatever you choose, be sure that its either sufficiently mainstream
that any HOWTO on the Internet would be compatible with your distro OR
make sure your distro vendor provides support. Also, expect to spend a
LONG time reading every last scrap of information you can find on Cyrus
-- it's perhaps the most complex piece of software with the least amount
of (correct) documentation available for Linux. I've banged my head on
my desk several times over this one.



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