Hi Anthony,

I'm setting up a very specialized email service that will ultimately need to support a few hundred thousand users or more. From looking at the code, I am left wondering if I need to install a separate IMAP server or does RoundCubeMail handle it all? If I do need to install an IMAP server, can anyone suggest one in particular? Right now, I'm seriously looking at Cyrus.

Roundcube is a browser based IMAP client. To use it you need a seperate IMAP server.

Given the system size you want to deploy, I'm not certain what IMAP server to suggest. Hosting a few hundred thousand users will present a fair few issues to be resolved (bandwidth, server specs etc..).

-- Michael michael.ross@atice.org

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On Feb 20, 2007, at 12:15 AM, Anthony Papillion wrote:

Hello,

I am new to the list and have a question. I've tried searching the
list archives but, for some reason, the links don't do anything
when I click on them. So please forgive me if I am asking a
question that's been asked before and feel free to point me to an
older post that might answer my question if appropriate.

I'm setting up a very specialized email service that will
ultimately need to support a few hundred thousand users or more.
From looking at the code, I am left wondering if I need to install
a separate IMAP server or does RoundCubeMail handle it all? If I do
need to install an IMAP server, can anyone suggest one in
particular? Right now, I'm seriously looking at Cyrus.

Given the size/scale of that are you sure you want to use beta software?

Either way, scaling email services to the size you're talking about
is a fairly difficult task. About the only open source project I can
think of off hand that would give you sealed servers and kind of
supports the kind of scaling you'd need is cyrus. Even then,
cyrusmurder clusters aren't quite high availability solutions.
They're more like load mitigation strategy. Meaning, if parts of them
fail some number of users will be tmpfailed while affected mailboxes
are restored. Last I looked, their mupdate server was a single point
of failure for mail delivery and it got really complicated if you
wanted to use mass storage since file locking is a pain, especially
under linux in clusters.

Either way, roundcube is just an imap client. To do the kind of thing
you're talking about, you're going to need some expertise in whatever
imapd software you decide on. Just administering an install of that
size is going to be a beast unless its well planned/designed. You
most likely will customize whatever it is you choose to some degree
to suit your needs. There may well be commercial solutions for all
this, but none spring to mind. Then again, I'm not an expert on the
subject.

J.