Sendmail for Large Sites

[Jorn Argelo]

Martin McCormick wrote:

>	How well does the administration of Sendmail scale up to sites
>serving as many as 25,000 users?
>  
>
On my traineeship we used two sendmail servers (a mail in and a mail 
out, both connected to an anti virus machine and then send to an 
Exchange server, where the actual mail gathered), and it worked just 
fine. This was used for about 2000-3000 users. These machines were 
running Solaris 8 though, but that doesn't really matter. When you used 
"top", the machines only had a server load of 1.85 or something. Some 
peeks up to 2.00, but not extreme high values. These were running on an 
UltraSPARC II or III (can't recall clearly, but they were quite old). 
Ironicly enough, the two Solaris machines always worked without giving a 
kick, and the Exchange enviroment was always a problem.

So in other words, these machines were merely gateways, but all the 
mails from all the locations all over Europe passed trough those two 
machines. I'm not really sure if you're planning to use a POP or IMAP 
daemon (not sure either if you can fetch mail from a mailserver using 
LDAP) on those machines as well, but if that's the case you'll need some 
heavier machines.  Do note that Sendmail recenly comes to the news with 
some major security exploits, so perhaps Postfix or Qmail is a better 
option.

Cheers,

Jorn