>Are there any better ideas of hardware requirements beyond large and small?
To keep out of trouble on the mailbox server, spend money on two or more caching LVD SCSI controllers and 160 mb/sec disks vs spending the money on 32-way 50 GHz Xeons. RAID1 for speed. (RAID5 is slower when writing, but ok when doing database work where 90% of disk i/o is read.) Disk i/o for mailboxes and mailqueue and logging is close to 50:50 read:write. separate disks and/or partitions for system, system swap, mailqueue+logging (or send the logging off the box to a syslog server) and mailboxes. plus have tons of, double?, spare disk space versus calculated storage so the necessary defragging runs as fast as possible. >Starting with larger and moving to smaller... what's the range that we're >talking about here for 100k-120k users? If admins here who run these big systems won't say what they run as hardware, I'm certainly can't say. >Assuming inbound, outbound and >client SMTP is being handled by a different box(es). > >Quad PIII 700Ghz / 2GB RAM if you have the $, do it. But have enough $ for the caching, 64-bit SCSI controllers (128 mb per controller) and RAID1 disks. >Dual PIII 1Ghz / 1GB RAM >Dual PIII 700Mhz / 1GB RAM >PIII 1Ghz / 1GB RAM >PII 500 Mhz / 1GB RAM I would start with 2 gb no matter what the CPU was. The disks subsystem is more important than the CPU. >Also, regarding anti-virus for web-mail users... I've been told not to use >declude on the same box. Well, not a box with 100K users and 500k msgs/day, but for small/medium servers, it obviously leaves enough machine for Imail to work just fine. IMGate with AV is only $560/year, unlimited users/domains, and is proven in high-volumes like yours. I can give you references. I can build the machine, too. >Are there any other alternatives that would >protect email being shared among users on that same box? As Scott said, infection via webmail attachements is quite rare, not the usual vector. You have many issues to address before you get to that one. It's not a show-stopper. Len www.menandmice.com/DNS-training : DNS Training BIND8NT.MEIway.com : ISC BIND for NT4 & W2K IMGate.MEIway.com : Build free, hi-perf, anti-abuse mail gateways Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html to be removed from this list. An Archive of this list is available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Please visit the Knowledge Base for answers to frequently asked questions: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/
