On Mon, Dec 25, 2006 at 06:33:45AM +0100, Kirill Ponazdyr wrote:
Nico,
For domain toaster of that size, qmail-ldap is a nice solution, but software seems to be orphaned now, as soon as some major SMTP enhancements come in I am afraid qmail will slowly die out.
qmail-ldap is not orphaned, I just don't have enough useful stuff together to make a new release. Btw. I don't see any major SMTP enhancements on the horizon.
As some have already mentioned, the Maildir format used by Qmail is suboptimal for handling large boxes, expecially with IMAP, I would strongly advise to use IMAP daemon which features caching mechanisms, such as Cyrus IMAP. Cyrus is great plus you get Sieve server side filtering but it is a challenge to get it working with Qmail, especially with virtual boxes.
Any format has pro and cons. Maildir is extremly robust. I have some large mailboxes and IMO it is not very slow. You need to make sure that the IMAP client smart enough and does not open every file in the Maildir. Caching is nice (mutt-hcache rocks) but if you access your Maildirs via different protocols you normaly end up with a total mess.
If you go with some non-caching IMAP daemon like courier, then it might make sence to setup IMAP Proxy too which would keep alife the IMAP connections for let`s say 2 min and reuse it for same user, so new IMAP processes do not have to be spawned and mailboxes rescanned every time web mail refreshes. Of course this hogs memory but is useful sometimes, especially if users have thousands of mails.
Frontend: Squirrelmail. By far most powerful web based MUA out there IMHO. Also very easy to ehnance, we wrote a LDAP control panel to it for example, so users can setup aliases, forwarders and away messages themselves. (Contact me offlist if you want it, I can send it to you).
I miss a powerful search option in most webfrontends. That's the only good thing of gmail.