[K12OSN] Emails for large districts

[Brian Chivers]

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
> 
> For something your size and the needs you probably have, I'd recommend looking at @Mail.
>  They even sell turnkey pre setup server solutions delivered to your door and offer
> onsite installation.  I quoted this system for a School district in Texas.  Take a look
> at their website atmail.com, I'm sure you'll be impressed.
> 
> You can actually price your entire cluster system pre-configured through their web form.
>  You would be looking at the multi-server cluster system.  The default 3 server cluster
> with all options would be about $27,000 and should handle around 100,000 users.  This is
> with unlimited users, unlimited domains, all Groupware, Anti-Spam, Anti-Virus, POP3 and
> IMAP, SMS messages, PDA support, sub administration support, the 3 servers and 3TB
> storage all pre-configured and ready to plug in.
> 
> The solutions is based on mostly open source and Linux with some proprietary stuff mixed
> in.  But it is still far less than most other commercial solutions and is an awesome setup.
> 
> Hope that helps,
> 
> Jim
> 
We use a system based on atmail, it's only the webmail interface but it works OK. I have to be very 
honest and say that there tech support isn't great, we've been waiting almost a month to get a 
problem solved where some emails aren't rendered properly if there headers are malformed.

Now this might be because we're running the webmail interface on top of a mixture of Dovecot & Exim 
and not there all in one solution but I've been disappointed that this issue has been on going for 
so long.

Brian Chivers
Portsmouth College

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    The views expressed here are my own and not necessarily
 
                the views of Portsmouth College