[K12OSN] Emails for large districts

[Craig White]

On Wed, 2007-11-14 at 17:05 -0500, Jim Kronebusch wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Nov 2007 16:37:12 -0500, Todd O'Bryan wrote
> > Our district has about 16,000 employees of varying types and is
> > currently using a web-based Exchange server to do email. The system is
> > slow, clunky, and the database is getting full, so we've been told to
> > clean out our mailboxes because they're going to delete all mail older
> > than 30 days.
> > 
> > My question is this--does anyone have experience with a system that
> > will scale reasonably to that many users. If so, we have about 90,000
> > students. Know of a system that will scale that big? The head IT guy
> > tells me that he was quoted a commercial cost of between $250k and
> > $500k for a system that would handle us, and, while that doesn't
> > surprise me, I think something effective could be done much more
> > economically.
> > 
> > I'm just wondering if there's anything I can point to and say, see!
> > 
> > Todd
> 
> Just one other thought, with a system this big and that many users, don't recommend a
> home built completely free solution.  Nobody will listen to you, and anything you say
> will likely be discredited from that point on.  Look for outside vendors that base their
> products on open source and can provide proven solutions with support.
> 
> Trust me, I've been down that road with the big boys before :-)
----
ignoring of course all of the large universities that are running their
own mail servers.

Craig