but, IME, it's irresponsible on both ends to conclude that that's all that bears attention.
All I need to hear is "500K msgs/day" to conclude, as Ipswitch did, that an Imail machine is either very near to, or past, GAMEOVER.
Among other things, a key architectural (software) limitation is what Ipswitch mentioned: "single thread, 60 connections at a time"
I see 60 and laugh/cry at the futility of trying to handle 500K/msgs day.
As a comparison, I setup IMGate to be very impatient (short timeouts) with SMTP clients and at every parameter, postfix can do 40+ rejects/second with no sweat, and still I see my clients with the larger IMGates averaging 75 to 300 simultaneous SMTP connections.
Imail, IIRC, will wait up to 1000 seconds for an SMTP connection to timeout. BAD MOVE, wasting those 60 SMTP slots on effectively dead sessions. I use 30 or 60 seconds. The avg IMGate SMTP session is under 10 seconds, often as low as 6 seconds.
I also assumed that, with that kind of investment in time and money and aggro trying to scale to that msg volume, and as a follower of this list, the admin is not an idiot (or he wouldn't gotten even that far) and would have configged and tuned and best-practiced as much as he can, worked with MS, Imail, Declude, whomever to the max, over weeks or months, and still couldn't get Imail to scale.
So, ime, the most responsible and guaranteed recommendation is to quit beating one's head against the wall, install IMGate, and go work on real problems. The Imail machine will purr again, other mail admins and local/remote users will stop complaining about delayed mail, reporting from their MTA logs talking to Imail about "SMTP connection timeout out", "<Imail> refused service on port 25">, "Timeout after DATA, msg may be sent more than once", etc, etc, etc. And critically, Imail SMTP will stop dying several times, or more, per day.
btw, IMGate's most recent high-volume convert had actually tried a separate MX as front-end to an IMail/declude box, the right idea, but he screwed up by using IMail/declude as the MX, getting the same problem he had on his backend Imail/declude. The day I got involved, his Imail/declude MX was sitting on msgs for 12 hours, his help desk was in flames. We wiped windows/imail/declude from his MX boxes 2 months ago, I installed IMgate, and his nightmare was over.
Len
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