[Advice needed] HW for mail server

[Ed Wilts]

On Tue, Dec 06, 2005 at 12:42:39PM +0100, Anze Vidmar wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I'm about to setup mail server (postfix, dovecot, squirrelmail, 
> spamassassin, clamav) to help an existing mail server (exchange) in the 
> same domain.
> 
> There will be about 50 - 80 users with mailboxes on this box. The 
> machine will be Mail server only.
> 
> I'm planning to use some workstation machine with IDE disks for this 
> job. The only thing that it's bothering me is how powerful must this 
> machine be?

postfix, dovecot, and squirrelmail won't take much at all.  The bigger
issue is going to be spamassassin and clamav and the size of the system
will need to be based on the volume of mail you're going to transfer.
We've pushed over 10,000 messages per day through sendmail on an old
P2/400 with 256MB memory but it wasn't running any anti-virus or spam
checking software.  I've found that spamassassin and clamav tend to use
a fair bit of memory. 

I would think that any modern CPU (i.e. P3/1Ghz or later which is
actually 3-4 years old) with 1GB or more of ram will likely suffice.
However, this is still going to be very dependent on how you use your
system.  If you have 50 users that love sending email to your own large
mailing lists and all 50 subscribe to busy mailing lists, you may need
to adjust accordingly.  

-- 
Ed Wilts, RHCE
Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts at ewilts.org
Member #1, Red Hat Community Ambassador Program