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 On Wednesday, 8 June 2011, Steve Spence <steve.spence@arkitechs.com> wrote:
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
-----Original Message----- From: Ryan Pugatch [mailto:rpug@linux.com] Sent: Tuesday, June 07, 2011 11:40 PM To: John LeCoque Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Hotmail?
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
-- -- Martin Hepworth Oxford, UK