[K12OSN] Emails for large districts

Thu Nov 15 02:50:12 UTC 2007

Yes.  Either Postfix or Sendmail for the MTA (I find Postfix easier),
and either Courier-IMAP or Dovecot for the IMAP part.  Either will scale
to what you're talking about.  Matter of fact, at the University of
Washington (my alma mater) which has over 35,000 students, the MTA of
choice was in fact Sendmail.  The IMAP daemon was and still is, as you
might imagine, UW-IMAP.  :-)  However, I would strongly recommend the
use of Maildirs, which Courier-IMAP, Dovecot, and Postfix all support. 
Maildirs make a mail server even more scalable than the traditional MBOX
format does, and maildir mailstores are more fault-tolerant.

If you want to scale to 16,000+, then MS Exchange Server is about the
worst way you can go.  I say that as a former Exchange Server
administrator and one who now watches our district wrestle with Exchange
Server 2003 for 20,000+ staff.  Their maintenance is hell.

--TP
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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
>
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