hardware sizing for a large mail installation?

[Lari Huttunen]

On 17:54:46 27/09/2004 "John Madden" <jmadden at ivytech.edu> wrote:
<clip>
> I'm looking for pointers (past experience in particular) for sizing a
> mail server for a large-ish mail install based on postfix, cyrus,
> amavisd-new, clamav, spamassassin, and web mail (most likely imp)
> serving around 100k mailboxes.

I'm out of my league in estimating the hardware side of things, 
but on the webmail front I would seriously reconsider using HORDE/IMP. 

Having evaluated it, I can say that:

- It is a resource hog both in terms of memory consumption and CPU
  cycles.
- It is insecure, as it is prone to XSS and session hijacking (mainly
  due to Javascript, but also due to the fact that you need to enable
  fopen wrappers and register globals to make the darn thing work).
- It lacks good input validation and I don't really see the point in 
  using an RDBMS in storing user settings and the like.
- It suffers from featuritis and a plethora of half-finished
  components.

If all you need is a webmail client, I would recommend that you
take a look at Hastymail, which is fast, RFC compliant and a lot more 
secure than IMP or the like. Combined with Cyrus, Exim and Slapd it
has the potential for a killer app (IMHO).

For more information, see:

<URL: http://hastymail.sourceforge.net/>

-- 
Lari Huttunen

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