[Ilugc] mail server architecture
- From: binand@xxxxxxxxx (Binand Sethumadhavan)
- Date: Thu May 18 19:24:34 2006
On 18/05/06, Mano <manokaran@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In a corporate scenario, anyone planning a mail server deployment
should plan for between 3-10GB of space per user, and 5 times that for
backups. Disk space is cheap.
Leaving out arguments about cheap disk space and CPU cycles, it just does
not seem to be an elegant solution. Why is this so? Are there any hurdles to
the one copy per mail approach - that others know of but Zimbra has
apparently missed!
I had actually written quite a lot more than quoted above; which I
deleted prior to sending. So, here goes, once again...
It is not sufficient that the MDA supports such a feature; the
POP/IMAP/Webmail/whatever clients should support it too. Now, all of
these should come to an understanding as to how to store a given
email's state for each intended recipient - Seen, Deleted, Forwarded,
Replied to etc. Further, there are "minor" details like allowing each
recipient to delete any of the attachments or any combination of them
(implemented by clients by downloading the message, editing it, and
uploading a new copy), allowing each recipient to deal with
disposition notifications ("read receipts") and so on, you can imagine
how complex this can become.
Now, it is OK if the IMAP server supports the feature - as webmail
clients usually hook into an IMAP server, and POP3 doesn't have
server-side processing of emails. I know that the popular ones - UW,
Courier and Cyrus - do not support any such feature (but as Suresh
pointed out, MS Exchange does). I imagine the reason is that such a
mail store requirement hasn't caused an itch to anyone willing to
scratch it so far. :)
Binand
Other related posts: