From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Mar 29 08:01:52 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) id IAA07335 for hackers-outgoing; Wed, 29 Mar 1995 08:01:52 -0800 Received: from aries.ibms.sinica.edu.tw ([140.109.40.248]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) with ESMTP id IAA07326 for ; Wed, 29 Mar 1995 08:01:32 -0800 Received: (from taob@localhost) by aries.ibms.sinica.edu.tw (8.6.11/8.6.9) id AAA06839; Thu, 30 Mar 1995 00:01:22 GMT Date: Thu, 30 Mar 1995 00:01:22 +0000 () From: Brian Tao To: Dick Bednar cc: hackers@freefall.cdrom.com Subject: Re: Mail... In-Reply-To: <199503281700.RAA11150@star-gate.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk >>> "Dick Bednar" said: > > My group is grappling blindly with the prospect of providing mail to 25,000 > students. Sadly, our Unix experience is limited, and much of it is > out-of-date. Eep. 25000 mail accounts == 25000+ entries in your /etc/passwd, and 25000 files in /var/mail. Although you did not explicitly say all 25000 mail accounts had to be on the same machine, I would recommend splitting that up into different mail servers. Divide the students into faculties or degree major or whatever. Then have a separate host for each and tell the students which machine to use to retrieve mail. If you want a consistent address for all the students, set up a separate mailhost that routes incoming mail to the proper machine based on a username lookup table. I don't really see any technical problems with having 25000 mail accounts on one machine, but that can mean a *hell* of a lot of disk space...