Re: e-mail server farm question

Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC wrote:


On May 23, 2006, at 1:35 AM, Evren Yurtesen wrote:

Vulpes Velox wrote:

On Mon, 22 May 2006 11:54:02 -0500
Kevin Kinsey <kdk@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

At 07:17 AM 5/22/2006, Evren Yurtesen wrote:

Hello,

I was wondering how does services like yahoo mail is storing
e-mails. Somehow the smtp server should know where to deliver
the mail inside the system and webmail should know from which
server to read it from.

Does anybody have any practical ideas about how it is done?


Derek Ragona wrote:
> If you are using sendmail, as most FreeBSD users are, you can
> check the sendmail.org site for information on mail handling.
> There are a number of methods that depend on your setup.
>

Well, it's pretty obvious that they aren't using a stock
SendMail:

# telnet mx2.mail.yahoo.com 25
Trying 67.28.113.72...
Connected to mx2.mail.yahoo.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 mta309.mail.re4.yahoo.com ESMTP YSmtp service ready

Short of finding an article written by someone 'in the know',
or an answer for someone like that, we can only guess. I'd
probably start with guessing a big DB on a large SAN;
which pretty much negates the "which server to read from"
question (up to a point). Everything else is pretty
academic. SMTP, IMAP, POP.

Maildir makes it easy to distribute it across multiple machines as
well.


What do you mean exactly? distributing 1 user's mails into seperate
machines? I didnt understand how Maildir helps to this actually.


I am not sure anyone was talking about distributing 1 person's mail across separate machines. The discussion seemed to be how to handle large amounts of mail spread out across machines, which maildir helps with as you can have one or more file servers and lots of consumers (imap/pop) and deliverers (mta) accessing those maildirs on your file servers. Combine with a backend database of some sort (we use an ldap db that includes the path for a specific accounts mail) and voilá.

Chad


Ah sorry, I didnt think it that way for a moment. I thought you meant Maildir
stores mails in seperate files compred to mbox format used by sendmail so...anyhow
my mistake :) But it is possible to make changes to sendmail so that it
will store to different folders also.

I think the conclusion is a database, multiple smtp servers querying database
to see where to forward received e-mails, multiple pop3/imap servers querying
database to see from where to read the e-mails and multiple storage machines.
This way it can scale to an unlimited size.

So it requires a lot of coding :)

Thanks,
Evren
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