High availability mail server options

[Aly S.P Dharshi]

Have you looked at a software called balance which would offer load 
balancing capabilities ?

I would use something like Courier IMAP as it also has an IMAP Proxy 
server which could come in handy for a wide range of things. I think that 
you can create something like /mail and put maildirs there, then dump them 
with a dump utility for example you could use xfsdump/xfsrestore if you 
used the XFS to do things.

Aly.

On Tue, 4 Oct 2005, Craig White wrote:

> On Tue, 2005-10-04 at 12:41 -0400, David Hollis wrote:
>> On Tue, 2005-10-04 at 09:21 -0700, Craig White wrote:
>>
>>>>
>>>>> 2. A Maildir setup would likely put each users folders in their home
>>>>> directories making it extremely difficult to backup the mail itself
>>>>> whereas something like cyrus-imapd has it's own mail store which can be
>>>>> put onto it's own partition and could simply be dumped.
>>>> Use qmail with vpopmail and all the mail ends up (by default unless you
>>>> change it) in /home/vpopmail/domains/domainX/userX/Maildir .
>>> ----
>>> and that's perfect. I don't think dovecot would do it that way.
>>>
>>> Craig
>>
>> I have postfix sending the mail to a /home/vmail/domains/<domain>/<user>
>> style arrangement.  Dovecot handles this arrangement nicely as well.
>> Rsync should be able to handle it pretty easily via cron job, but it
>> would be nice if I can reliably take it to a lower level.
>>
>> For receiving external mail, I can simply list both (or more) of the
>> mail servers with MX and let them sync each other.  For joe internal
>> user sending mail and accessing via IMAP, I would do an LVS or
>> round-robin DNS style thing to get them to one of the servers.  While I
>> may have a brief interruption in the event of a server failure, thats
>> acceptable at this point.
> ----
> I would be taking this up with a dovecot list since they are certain to
> give you much better real world experience with these ideas.
>
> Craig
>
>
>

-- 
Aly S.P Dharshi
aly.dharshi at telus.net

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