Scalable Mail solution with NAS

Wed Jan 31 22:55:24 UTC 2001

On Wed, Jan 31, 2001 at 08:11:03PM +0000, Neil J. McRae wrote:
> > > > >/export/mailboxes/j/o/h/n/johndoe.mbox
> 
> In the past I've actually found that reversing the letters gives
> much better randomosity around the directory structure so, johndoe at clown.org
> would end up in e/o/d/n/johndoe and you don't take much of a hit for this.

i'm currently implementing a largish mail server, and have come up with
what i think is a nice way to deal with scale and redundancy, etc, etc.

what i have done is create a couple DNS zones, which are like:

$ORIGIN mailbox.domain.com
bob    IN CNAME  popserver1
john   IN CNAME  popserver1
bill   IN CNAME  popserver2

$ORIGIN smtp.domain.com
bob    IN A  10.1.1.1 ; ipaddr of mailserver1
john   IN A  10.1.1.1 ; ipaddr of mailserver1
bill   IN A  10.1.1.2 ; ipaddr of mailserver2

then, users are told to set their SMTP to username.smtp.domain.com and
to direct their POP/IMAP client at username.mailbox.domain.com.

you might even be able to get away with a single map.

incoming mail should direct username at domain.com to username at username.domain.com

in any case, using this method, you can now arbitrarily store mailboxes
on any of several machines, even possibly in several locations.

if a server fails, you can quickly redirect the users to another server so
that new mail piles up in their new mailbox, and you can restore the broken
server on a more leisurely pace.

this can be extended to allow users to check their email with a web-based
packet at http://username.mailbox.domain.com, or even be shortened so
that they can have personal website http://username.domain.com

how to implement the actual DNS is left as an exercise of the student.

-- 
[ Jim Mercer          jim at pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.ca ]
[          Reptilian Research -- Longer Life through Colder Blood          ]
[ aka                        jim at reptiles.org              +1 416 410-5633 ]