Mailing List Archive: DBMail: users

System scalability

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dnillese at une

Apr 7, 2009, 3:05 PM

Post #1 of 4 (1039 views)
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System scalability

Hi,
I'm contemplating DBMail as a solution for our University email system. I need to work through a few options to work out our best choice.

I have a few questions around scalability, I was hoping someone could help.

Our mailstore is currently around 32,000 users with around 8 million emails on disk at the moment, occupying about 350GB of mail.

How well does DBmail scale to these numbers on Postgres?

Has anyone built a DBMail solution this big before I can have a chat with?

Is there a solution for user self administration of vacation/autoreply messages? Since we have a large number of accounts self administration for the majority of user issues is important. I have found a few administration webapps for admins, but nothing for users as far as I can see.

We use LDAP for aliases, authentication and authorization. Is there any way to tie this to DBmail? My main issue would be with aliases, everything else we can work round with our IAM system executing SQL into Postgres to enable users.

If you would like to know more about our site and configuration, let me know.

Thanks,
Dave

paul at nfg

Apr 8, 2009, 12:32 AM

Post #2 of 4 (953 views)
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Re: System scalability [In reply to]

David Nillesen wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm contemplating DBMail as a solution for our University email system. I need to work through a few options to work out our best choice.
>
> I have a few questions around scalability, I was hoping someone could help.
>
> Our mailstore is currently around 32,000 users with around 8 million emails on disk at the moment, occupying about 350GB of mail.
>
> How well does DBmail scale to these numbers on Postgres?

You will need a competent DBA to tune the indexes. I know there are
installations of that size around, even running on mysql.

>
> Has anyone built a DBMail solution this big before I can have a chat with?

Sorry, non-disclosure etc.

> Is there a solution for user self administration of vacation/autoreply messages? Since we have a large number of accounts self administration for the majority of user issues is important. I have found a few administration webapps for admins, but nothing for users as far as I can see.

Definitely. DBmail supports sieve mailfiltering and has a managesieve
server daemon for self administration by clients. Webmail clients such
as horde(ingo) and squirrelmail(avelsieve) contain php code that will
act as a client and talk to the sieve management daemon.

>
> We use LDAP for aliases, authentication and authorization. Is there any way to tie this to DBmail? My main issue would be with aliases, everything else we can work round with our IAM system executing SQL into Postgres to enable users.

LDAP is fully supported for aliases and authentication. Authorization
(imap-acl) configuration is sql-based only.

> If you would like to know more about our site and configuration, let me know.

--
________________________________________________________________
Paul Stevens paul at nfg.nl
NET FACILITIES GROUP GPG/PGP: 1024D/11F8CD31
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michael.monnerie at is

Apr 8, 2009, 3:48 AM

Post #3 of 4 (942 views)
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Re: System scalability [In reply to]

On Mittwoch 08 April 2009 David Nillesen wrote:
> Our mailstore is currently around 32,000 users with
> around 8 million emails on disk at the moment, occupying about 350GB
> of mail.
> How well does DBmail scale to these numbers on
> Postgres?

It runs, of course you need competent hardware. I'm working on index
optimization for dbmail-2.2, cleaning some indices out or lightening
them up. Patches to follow, should help a lot with installations of that
size.

> Is there a solution for user self administration of
> vacation/autoreply messages? Since we have a large number of accounts
> self administration for the majority of user issues is important. I
> have found a few administration webapps for admins, but nothing for
> users as far as I can see.

We have developed a complete toolset which I can offer you for free.
It's php based, and you can create customers/domains/users/aliases, and
each user can have the right to administer his password/vacation with
start/stop dates.

I was already planning to release it to GPL as a sf.net project. If
others are interested too, I'll do that sooner than later.

> We use LDAP for aliases, authentication and authorization. Is there
> any way to tie this to DBmail? My main issue would be with aliases,
> everything else we can work round with our IAM system executing SQL
> into Postgres to enable users.

Our tool currently directly connects to the db, so some rework would be
needed. Shouldn't be a big pain.

> If you would like to know more about our site and configuration, let
> me know.

If you're interested, let me know per PM.

mfg zmi
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// Michael Monnerie, Ing.BSc ----- http://it-management.at
// Tel: 0660 / 415 65 31 .network.your.ideas.
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aleksander at krediidiinfo

Apr 8, 2009, 4:12 AM

Post #4 of 4 (955 views)
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Re: System scalability [In reply to]

Michael Monnerie wrote:
> I was already planning to release it to GPL as a sf.net project. If
> others are interested too, I'll do that sooner than later.

You should definitely do that. We have a PHP based setup, that has mail
forwarding, vacation messages and filtering capability for end users all
using sieve. But it connects via mysql directly, not via timsieved. It
also shows what aliases an acccount has and who is forwarding messages
to/from these aliases etc (using helper tables, as this info is
unavailable from the users sieve script). It is very custom and also
includes non dbmail related stuff.

I think people would contribute, I'd sure like to offer my users a more
generic solution probably with more features than the current setup.

Regards,

--

Aleksander Kamenik
System Administrator
Krediidiinfo AS
an Experian Company
Phone: +372 665 9649
Email: aleksander [at] krediidiinfo

http://www.krediidiinfo.ee/
http://www.experiangroup.com/
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