From owner-freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Apr 12 19:33:57 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7B33F16A4CE for ; Mon, 12 Apr 2004 19:33:57 -0700 (PDT) Received: from Shenton.org (23.ebbed1.client.atlantech.net [209.190.235.35]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with SMTP id AE20043D31 for ; Mon, 12 Apr 2004 19:33:56 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from chris@Shenton.Org) Received: (qmail 10231 invoked by uid 1001); 13 Apr 2004 02:33:56 -0000 To: Aristedes Maniatis References: <20040412173824.GC13343@bewilderbeast.blackhelicopters.org> From: Chris Shenton Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2004 22:33:56 -0400 In-Reply-To: (Aristedes Maniatis's message of "Tue, 13 Apr 2004 08:44:26 +1000") Message-ID: <86fzb8d2sr.fsf@PECTOPAH.shenton.org> User-Agent: Gnus/5.110002 (No Gnus v0.2) Emacs/21.3 (berkeley-unix) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii cc: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org cc: "Michael W. Lucas" Subject: Re: mail server recommendations? X-BeenThere: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Internet Services Providers List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 13 Apr 2004 02:33:57 -0000 Aristedes Maniatis writes: > We have sold Communigate Pro (http://www.ish.com.au/communigate) to > customers with up to 30,000 accounts. Others run up to 100,000 on a > single server, more in a cluster. It runs great on FreeBSD and that is > the combination we usually recommend and use ourselves. It costs > money, but you didn't say whether you wanted a free or commercial > product. I plugged qmail-ldap in an earlier message, but in a previous life^H^H^H^H job we deployed Communigate Pro (on Solaris)-: and it was rock-solid and handled pretty heavy loads without burdening the server much. Good responsive online tech support and bug-fixes, feature additions. IMHO their web gui's a bit ... uh... primitive, but it's useable. At another ISP we supported, we deployed Mirapoint mail appliances and they were fine too, but I don't have much direct hands-on experience with them. Both are worthy commercial offerings, and I think better than most other commercial alternatives. Check communigate's web for some interesting tech-rag reviews and comparisons with other products. I would definitely advocate some kind of fault-tolerant architecture, whether it's tight clustering, loosely-coupled federation (qmail-ldap with shared NFS mailstore), or whatnot. Email's dead critical to users and you can't afford downtime. It's really sweet to be able to take down one MTA/SMTP/POP/IMAP/LDAP box in the middle of the day for an upgrade, and have no one notice. :-)