[BBLISA] OSS campus mail

[Lisa Koch]

Hi Daniel and Rick,

Analyzing a large University email system is not quite as simple as 
telnetting to port 25.

I'm at Northeastern (in the College of Engineering, not central IT, but 
I know a little about the central system).  I suspect that the machine 
you reached was one of several antispam gateways sitting in front of 
the main system, which is rather complex.  Northeastern actually runs 
Lotus Domino for faculty and staff, and SunOne with a portal front end 
for students.

Even our smaller mail system here in Engineering runs a Symantec 
antivirus gateway product on our MX hosts, in front of our main mail 
server which runs standard open source packages.

I bet most large systems are running several different products on a 
number of machines.  You could probably get some idea what is going on 
from a careful examination of the headers of messages that have gone in 
and out of the system.

Regards, Lisa

Dr. Lisa K. Koch
Asst. Dean for Educational and Computer Technology
College of Engineering, Northeastern University
230 Snell Eng. Ctr, 360 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA 02115
lkoch at coe.neu.edu * Phone: 617-373-4430 * Fax: 617-373-8504

On Oct 25, 2004, at 9:15 AM, Daniel Feenberg wrote:

>
>
> On Sun, 24 Oct 2004, Rick Martin wrote:
>
>>
>> Hi all.
>>
>> Is anyone using open source software to support campus email?
>> Any offer to share info on hardware/software configurations
>> would be greatly appreciated.
>
> You can usually check out anyone by telneting to port 25 of their
> mailserver. I just checked UConn, BU and Northeastern. The first two 
> were
> running Sendmail and NE was running Postfix. I believe that nearly all
> universities run Sendmail, Postfix or Exim. We run Sendmail on a small
> installation, but if I were starting again I would try all three before
> deciding. The details of what each can accomplish easily are different.
> For example, Sendmail makes it almost impossible to keep a file copy of
> each outgoing message, Postfix makes it trivial.
>
> You might want to check out the book "Sendmail Performance Tuning" for
> guidance if you select sendmail. Also, consider a solid state disk for
> message queues. There is a self-serving white paper by such a vender at
> http://www.soliddata.com/pdf/bpsendmail.pdf
>
>
>
>
>>
>> Background:
>>
>> Running Exchange over a couple dozen servers, our campus mail
>> went down for three days.  A "raid-50" failed, and restoring
>> it was a nightmare.  The CIO got hot, and she wants the whole
>> thing re-implemented to deliver uninterrupted service.  First
>> order of business is a survey.
>>
>> I got drafted to evaluate OSS because I run a couple of
>> department servers with sendmail + mimedefang + NAI + SA and such
>> for about 1,500 users.  The whole campus is a much bigger deal.
>>
>> The campus will likely buy into some all-encompassing product, as
>> they are unwilling to give up any feature currently implemented
>> in Exchange, at least for the faculty users.
>>
>> Of course the trade-off for license fees is programmer time for
>> integrating many pieces to achieve the result.  I can make
>> Scientific Wild-Ass Guesses, but could really benefit from anyone
>> who has been there and done that.  Mainly we need a feel for how
>> much time and money go into implementing, training, and upkeep.
>>
>> Thanks in advance.
>>
>> Rick Martin
>> UMass-Boston, CS Dept.
>> 617-287-6440
>>
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>
>
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