Getting back into the conversation about the performance of roundcube and other webmail solutions...
We all have different needs for hosted email for customers and different hassles of customer support. There's many good reasons to do it, and many good reasons against. For my own internal use, once I got a bulletproof postfix + dovecot setup for multiple domains (virtual domains), the bottleneck is really disk space. For the network engineering operations my MXes support, there's four production domains and three domains which are used exclusively for testing/development purposes. Those three are domains that exist solely for the purpose of messing about with SSL keys, MX, SPF and DKIM records, playing with nginx vs apache2, and intentionally breaking things with test/development virtual machines. Testing of Linux HA httpd setups facing out to the real world for public ipv4/ipv6 traffic before they get put into use in production. If a domain costs $9/year or something like that it's good to have a few extras. Once the virtual hosting was set up in postfix + dovecot, I found that there is little additional effort to host three, eight or twenty domains than the effort to host 40 domains. It is indeed a huge hassle to support individual end user customers (I am *not* about to walk somebody on the phone through how to set up their Outlook Express), but for business accounts not nearly so much. Email access for business accounts is intentionally somewhat restricted: No old shitty clients (the servers only listen with TLSv1.2, no SSLv2 or SSLv3 allowed). Some of those are as simple as setting up the MX records in a zonefile on my three authoritative nameservers, then postfix+dovecot aliases that redirect common inboxes like support, sales, info, postmaster, webmaster, [email protected] to a single person who is responsible for that domain. Takes literally 20 seconds to type those into the vmail text configuration file for postfix. As for roundcube itself, looking through its source code and how it works, it appears that tuning it for performance is not much different than any LAMP-like PHP5+Perl web application. It appears that it uses various Perl libraries for its imap/tls access and a lot of the back end. So in that case, getting it set up right is a matter of having apache2.4 and php5 tuned correctly, on a decent server with enough RAM. After further testing today, I would be confident in hundreds up to several thousand accounts (supporting maybe 50 to 80 concurrent sessions) on a fast single core machine with 16GB of RAM and a good SSD. The entirety of roundcube is 4MB zipped. On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 6:36 PM, Paul Stewart <[email protected]> wrote: > Roundcube works well (the original question) ... make sure you stay > updated on security etc > > Definitely much prefer running email in-house ... granted the size of the > operation can quickly determine if you want to have resources assigned to > running any type of servers in-house. > > Really like Surgemail - it's a great system for small email platforms > (under 50k mailboxes). At former $$$job we ran several different Surgemail > systems for customers with great success. Never tried their > antispam/antivirus - the person making that decision at the time went > outsourced. I have seen better looking webmail on Surgemail but their > system is very functional and rather simple which is more important in my > opinion. > > -p > > -----Original Message----- > From: Af [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Steve > Sent: Thursday, November 5, 2015 10:53 AM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Roundcube > > I've run Surgemail and Zimbra without any issues for years. Surgemail is > cheap fast and extremely configurable. It has a mirror license you can get > so you run servers flawlessly. I nan get it installed and running in > literally 3 minutes. It pretty much configures itself. It isn't the best > looking webmail but in the back end it is the most granular and fast mail > server I've ever seen. > > Zimbra well its free and a somewhat decent exchange alternative. Runs > like a pig compared to Surgemail but it is solid. > > Roundcube I've run it only in test environments and I'm actually looking > at it again for domain hosting. So far no issues and it looks nice. I'll > have to see once you get a couple hundred people running on it how well it > really works. > > It really isn't that much work to manage mail servers at all. Once they > are set up if you keep them up to date they really can be left alone. They > alert you to any problems ahead of time. > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Mike Hammett" <[email protected]> > To: [email protected] > Sent: Thursday, November 5, 2015 8:18:25 AM > Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Roundcube > > There seems to be two camps. One where people are running away form their > own e-mail servers and then those that embrace it. I haven't found e-mail > to be that difficult to manage. > > > > > ----- > Mike Hammett > Intelligent Computing Solutions > http://www.ics-il.com > > > > Midwest Internet Exchange > http://www.midwest-ix.com > > > ----- Original Message ----- > > From: "Chuck Hogg" <[email protected]> > To: [email protected] > Sent: Thursday, November 5, 2015 6:01:35 AM > Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Roundcube > > > I hope you are charging handsomely for email. We just quit it for our > customer base...and only had 2-3 complaints. Everyone already has an email > address. > > > > > > > > Regards, > Chuck > > On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 3:22 AM, Eric Kuhnke < [email protected] > > wrote: > > > > > > Any tips of tricks for success with using Roundcube to provide webmail to > individual end users (not a single domain corporate environment)? > > Server side is postfix + spamassassin + dovecot. > > I have a successful 'test' setup of roundcube running in a VM doing > TLSv1.2 on smtp and imap, logged into several user accounts on test domains > on the dovecot server. > > Wondering if anyone has run into hiccups or weird things when using > roundcube in a production environment. > >
