Managing 40 Million User MailBoxes

Question

Hi,
I have started working on Sun Messaging Server 6.3 (imsimta version command is giving some error so cannot tell you explicitly the exact version or patch right now. it says 'ld.so.1: imtacli: fatal: libsasl.so: version `SUNWprivate1.1' not found (required by file /opt/SUNWmsgsr/lib/libimta.so)
ld.so.1: imtacli: fatal: libsasl.so: open failed: No such file or directory
The idea of the project is to create and support 40 million mailboxes for an organization. I would like to know the details to envision the areas of concern and issues that should be taken care of while deciding approach.
We need to integrate this message server application for the users as a sequence to an already existing application. How proxyAuth be useful in this case?
Anticipaing earliest response. TIA.
Mirza

Answer 1

Mirza_Baig wrote:
Thank you for your time and answers. I will be clarifying the not so clear and questions/perspectives that remains to be answered.
2. Discussion going on it. :)I figured as much. How this is implemented and the consequences/limitations is probably the single most important aspect of your project.
3. jSieve is Java implementation of Sieve. Details here.(http://james.apache.org/jsieve/index.html)
jSieve and Sun Messaging Server both implement the Sieve (RFC3028) language. The underlying scripting language is therefore the same for both implementations - so in this context jSieve isn't necessary or useful.
10. I assumed milter to be a kind of filter that does this message body content based filtering based on its type such as images, pdf etc. Please refer to the following for background on what the milter plugin does/provides.
http://msg.wikidoc.info/index.php/About_milter_plugin
I understand for header based filtering Sieve is better approach, than mapping tables.Correct. Mappings tables are more used for actioning lower-level attributes, such as the connecting host's IP address, rate-limiting, modification of recipient addresses, ACL's etc.
The milter plugin actually makes use of sieve actions in the underlying code to implement some of the milter functionality (modification of headers for example are mapped to various sieve functions).
11. By filter precedence I meant, In case all the three filters are applied a user level, a channel level and mta level (with different rules for same domain for example) which filter rule would actually work ( user/channel/mta level)?All three would be evaluated for a given message. The user level filter can over-ride certain actions, but not others. For example if the global (channel/mta) filter 'discard'ed an email but the user level 'fileinto' the email, then the fileinto will be actioned. If the global (channel/mta) filter 'jettison'ed the email, it would be deleted unconditionally as this is a non-override option.
14. Yes, I meant both. SSL communication between msgs and encryption of actual content.SSL communication is easy enough to set up and is documented in the manuals (http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-4428/bgbar?a=view). Encryption of actual content is much less trivial and requires that the client (which you are writing) encrypt the contents of the message. We provide the smime utility with our web-client but this wouldn't be useful outside of our client.
We have implemented proxyAuth and that lets us sign in all users automatically signed in once they log in to external application of which this msg center is a part.
We are not using IMAP servers. Entire Message retrieval and delivery is SMTP based.You can't retrieve messages using SMTP. SMTP is a delivery-only protocol. IMAP/POP are the retrieval protocols.
Below is the response to ./imsimta version that we are suppose to work on.
Sun Java(tm) System Messaging Server 6.3-1.04 (built May 9 2007; 32bit)
libimta.so 6.3-1.04 (built 00:41:36, May 9 2007; 32bit)
SunOS ccdev-ldap12 5.10 Generic_125100-10 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire-V490
ccdev-ldap12.MCS:You may want to look at getting this system updated to the latest patch release (120228-23). This patch includes a number of bug-fixes which may save you time/hassle in the future.
Also please note we now provide a 64bit version of our product which you may or may not want to consider. Although it doesn't offer much (any) performance gains that I am aware of it does remove the annoying memory address-space limitation.
a. ims-mschannel/tcp-intranet channel/tcp-local channel are few of the channels available for filtering. Which one is applicable for message delivery and receipt?ims-ms -> used to delivery messages into the store
tcp-* -> these are channels that can receive/send emails
A message being enqueued/dequeued from any of the channels can trigger a filter to be used (channel level). The user-level filter is triggered when the email is delivered to the store (ims-ms).
I suspect however that you would be using LMTP for final delivery which is another different channel again.
b. What is the maximum queue size of the message center for message delivery. We are able to deliver messages at the rate of 30 msg/sec as of now with limited hardware as of now. Is this queue size a function of actual msg size or the no of msg in the queue?You seem to be mixing terms here so your question isn't very clear to me.
The rate of email delivery is a factor of the size of the email, the number of recipients and the capability of the underlying hardware. The larger the email the less the number of emails that can be delivered simply because larger emails means more disk I/O and more network traffic. Other factors which influence this include choice of file-system, whether LMTP is used for final delivery (between front-end MTA/back-end store), version of Operation System and the list goes on.
The number of messages in a queue doesn't really get into it. If you start getting more then say 100,000 queued emails ready for delivery then you will need to tune some parameters. Messaging server by default doesn't keep track of infinite queued emails in RAM as this would eventually consume all RAM on the system.
c. I would like to know the location where the message center stores the messages?For any given account (replace <uid> with the uid of account), you can run the following command to see where the folders are on disk:
./mboxutil -lxp user/<uid>/*
d. What are disadvantages of Solaris 10 (ZFS) clustering for message archiving that provides periodic backups and how dataguard is useful in File system level message replication? :)I don't get involved with ZFS deeply enough to be able to answer this with any authority. Push this one onto your local Sun representative.
Regards,
Shane.