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Subject: Re: pop-before-smtp (was Re: FreeInet and checking mail?)
From: Yiorgos Adamopoulos (adamodblab.ece.ntua.gr)
Date: Wed Jun 07 2000 - 14:44:36 CDT

On Wed, Jun 07, 2000 at 09:25:39PM +0200, Brad Knowles wrote:
> 9000 unique logins? We have over 600,000 mailboxes on one of our
> servers, with over 400,000 active accounts. Maybe I don't understand
> how you're counting unique logins, but this would seem to me to be a
> loss of scalability of about two orders of magnitude.

So what happens if this server fails? Do you get 600K telephone calls at
the helpdesk?

Don't get me wrong here, but having 600K users in one machine means two
things:

- You can afford to have 600K users spread to 10 machines of 60K users
  each (and something along the lines the www.mirapoint.com solution
  proposes).

- Your solution cannot scale. And it cannot scale not because it supports
  600K users, but because at the first HW failure everyone loses service.

[ I would really like to know the HW specs of this machine btw. ]

Yes, having IMAP means taking up more resources, but this is not necesarily
bad. It depends on what you want to do with it and what you want your users
to do with it.

There are relevant discussions on this matter (as well as to the flame
drawing subject of maildir vs. mbx format) at comp.mail.imap where MRC has
explained his reasoning a number of times. It is not a love-or-hate
situation. The protocol is there and if you need its capabilities you use
it. If you need other capabilities you either extend an existing protocol
or design a new one (and this is not to be taken as a personal note to
Brad). 

--
Yiorgos Adamopoulos         -- #include <std/disclaimer.h>
adamodblab.ece.ntua.gr     -- Knowledge and Data Base Systems Laboratory, NTUA