Does anyone happen to know what Microsoft using to delivery Hotmail?
Is it Exchange? Can anyone recommend a good system for developing web
mail services? I need something that can easy support 400K users
400k is easy enough to do with either high end enterprise or low end
carrier grade products.
Or if you have the patience to do it, open source ftw.
The MTA isn't the criterion here as much as all the other stuff -
bandwidth, storage, directory services, security / antispam ...
--srs
If you already have MS Exchange just use OWA (outlook web access)
feature to enable webaccess. but like suresh said its storage,
directory services and mail traffic that matters most.
regards
syed.
I would think licensing would be a large fee with any enterprise type product. I wonder what the bandwidth requirements would be.
Cheers
Ryan
We do not have Exchange this would be for a consumer e-mail service
that is ad supported.
In which case, your best bet is to hire some sort of consultant to
build it for you
Or to outsource it to one of several white label providers who will
host it and run it for you.
--srs
What about starting with Zimbra's Open Source edition, and building onto it?
That still doesnt address the storage, security other than antispam /
antivirus etc 
If he's got to ask how to build it ..
What about starting with Zimbra's Open Source edition, and building onto
it?
Let me just step in here and say.. it's tough to build onto Zimbra. At
work, we support ~1000 users on Zimbra (network edition), with hundreds of
thousands of messages flowing through daily, and it doesn't like you
tinkering with stuff under the hood. Most of your customizations get
blown away when you upgrade. That said, I know of some organizations who
customize it like crazy (I had heard that Lycos's free mail system is
Zimbra-based, and Yahoo as well). Once you deviate, though, don't expect
to stick to Zimbra's releases. It might be easier to just start fresh
with postfix, amavis, spamassassin, dovecot, etc. We've also run into
some pain in scaling it out (they want you to use Red Hat Clustering, but
there's no great way to scale out the mail store regardless).
Ryan
That what I found with most the open source /Linux mail products that
customizing and extending can be difficult and a lot of time and effort.
The exchange is one of the easiest ways to roll out large scale web base
email if just expensive in upfront costs.
Interns of Hotmail they initially use to use Solaris for the MTA and
storage and FreeBSD for the web services ( Apache ) they suppose of migrated
windows by now using windows products Again I think this highly customize
solution which may not be very useful http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotmail
we went through a similar search for a high volume solution which we could
customize and brand right now we using we high a hybrid of
(exchange/Icewarp/Atmail/ two layers of spam filtering )
Steve
Have a look at the Hermes mail system at cam.Ac.uk, built buy among
people Philip Hazel of exam fame
It will give you some insight into the challenges of building a
scalable high perfomance mail system.
Martin
That's one of several classic papers - another by Yann Golanski from
about a decade back, also using Exim
Let me just step in here and say.. it's tough to build onto Zimbra.
At work, we support ~1000 users on Zimbra (network edition), with
hundreds of thousands of messages flowing through daily, and it
doesn't like you tinkering with stuff under the hood. Most of your
customizations get blown away when you upgrade. That said, I know
of some organizations who customize it like crazy (I had heard that
Lycos's free mail system is Zimbra-based, and Yahoo as well).
Once you deviate, though, don't expect to stick to Zimbra's
releases.
Seconded. In terms of functionality and interface, I like Zimbra a lot, but they make Microsoft and Apple look like amateurs in the "our way, or not all" game. As a small friends-and-family installation, I can't afford to dedicate a whole box exclusively to Zimbra[0], and trying to make it play nice with anything else running on the same server is a pain. As you say, pretty much anything that they don't have a GUI setting for is a nightmare to keep working across upgrades.
I'd imagine it's actually better if you're planning a bigger-scale deployment and can have the architecture a lot more in line with how they expect it to be from the start.
Regards,
Tim.
[0] OK, I probably could now with a VM, but the virtualisation support on my hosting box wasn't really there when I started...
Philip did not in fact have much to do with Hermes other than writing
Exim. (I think he might have had a hand in early versions of our user
administration scripts...)
Our webmail software "Prayer" was written by David Carter. It's basically
Pine for the web - it uses the UW-IMAP c-client library. We handle about
30K active / 5K concurrent users on one webmail server and it isn't
breaking a sweat.
David also did a lot of customization to Cyrus, mainly replication and
undelete. These features are part of the standard Cyrus distribution now,
and they hve been significantly improved by the guys at Fastmail.fm.
I wrote a description of our setup several years ago. The architecture is
still basically the same, though storage volumes are up by a few binary
orders of magnitude.
http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/~fanf2/hermes/doc/talks/2004-02-ukuug/
Tony.
As far as commercial packages go, Surgemail is worth a look. Very affordable and insanely powerful and customizable. The support team is the development team. It's not uncommon for bugs to be fixed in hours to day and even new features requests to be added in days to weeks. Runs on practically any major OS you prefer...
-Vinny
As far as commercial packages go, Surgemail is worth a look. Very affordable
and insanely powerful and customizable. The support team is the development
team. It's not uncommon for bugs to be fixed in hours to day and even new
features requests to be added in days to weeks. Runs on practically any
major OS you prefer...-Vinny
+1 for Surgemail
Have been running it for years and it's rock solid.
Wayne
I rolled postfix, OpenLDAP, MySQL and @mail on a bunch of blades and NetApp storage which ran about 200K users for years without any problems. We had Alteons for load balancing.
For spam/virus/etc I used the IronPort boxes (before they were Cisco). We very rarely had any problems with this, OpenLDAP broke once, but since the LDAP front ends were behind Alteons nobody ever noticed it.
The whole thing cost less than the licenses for most commercial systems we looked at.