[olug] RE: [OLUG] IMP/Horde?

[Jeff Hinrichs]

> But am interested in running exim, cyrus, mysql, imap, and horde/imp if I
> hear good results.
I am evaluating solutions to replace exchange server at my work.  I've been
through a number of solutions based both on Linux and NT.   We've got 50
employees, 10 shared email addresses/folders for customer communication and
another 20 shared folders for internal use.  We also have two customer
mailing lists.  A few people in management use shared calendars.

I am now running stress tests on cyrus(2.0.16)+exim(3.22)+sieve(1.0).  I've
used the following clients against the setup: Outlook 2000, Outlook
Express(5.5), SquirrelMail.  Out of all the different solutions I've tried I
like this one the best.

Last night it handled 1600 email messages a minute.  I thottled my @home
connection so I am going to setup a script on my machines at work  to blast
it while I'm sending from here.  (I'm using a python script I wrote that
sends 9 message and then closes and reopens the connection to send more
until the end of my list is met)  I launch multiple copies on multiple
machines.  I use 9 messages because Exim will defer delivery if 10 or more
messages are received in a single connection.  I then send a few messages
with 1MB attachments to everyone on the list while the process is running.
I've got the Outlook clients setup to check every minute and the
SquirrelMail clients to refresh their folder list every 30 seconds.  So far
the system is handling it and I'm quite satisfied.  As I am maxing out all
of the stress I can think of, which is more than we recieve in a day and
compressing it to one minute tests.  (The main reason for this is that
machine has a single IDE drive and I wanted to make sure there wouldn't be a
bottleneck for our current requirements)

I've been documenting my testing and I am planning on giving a presentation
at one of the OLUG meetings when I've decided on the setup and have
implemented it.  Until we have it in use it is just so much speculation<g>.
No stess testing ever completely encompasses real world usage.

My questions about Horde/IMP have to do with the fact that SquirrelMail
currently doesn't support shared folders.  I believe that it can be modified
to do so but I don't have the time to make the mods so I'm looking for a web
based system that does and IMP does.  So I am going to give it a whirl.


Main Questions in setting up mail:
User Agent(s) what do your end users currently use and what platforms do you
need to support.
# of users
pop accounts vs. "Black Box" with no user accounts
Shared Folders/Accounts (access and permissions)
User Authentication/Management (PAM, Clear text, Kerberos, LDAP)
procmail/forward vs. Sieve  (see pop accounts vs. "Black Box")
mbox vs. maildir  (your choice of an IMAP daemon will force you one way or
the other)
IMAP daemon.  By answering the other questions you end up with this answer.
sendmail vs. qmail vs. exim    (this is a religious one but I like exim
because it is [imo]easier to configure than sendmail)
virtual domains (I'm only worried about corporate so this isn't a factor for
me but may be very important for others)

Phil has a great point about letting sleeping dogs lie.  If it works don't
break it, especially email.  It would be akin to experimenting on your phone
system.  You are better off planning for future growth (3-5 years) and build
a system that will handle those forecasted needs.  Luckily we have multiple
domains names at work and some we use just for "Brochure" sites.  There
isn't any email for them, they all point to the corporate email.  So I've
been building a system that replicates our current system using one of those
domains.  This way I don't interfere with a primary company communication
avenue while I'm evaluating other mail systems.

-Jeff
p.s.  If anyone on the list is seeing something that I am missing please let
me know.



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