Large webmail site...

[Anon]

I want to develop a webmail that is going to be used on a hopefully big and trafficed site. The main point is that is should be able to handle as many users as possible. I\'d like some advice what the server should run.

A first suggestion would be Linux/PHP/IMAP. How stable is that and how many users will it handle? What things would be worth thinking of? What would be a better solution? =)

Any help would be appreciated.

/Fredrik

[Anon]

"As many as possible" is a pretty amorphous goal! To give you some ideas of scale and cost, Network World (IIRC) had an article recently comparing enterprise-sized email systems; perhaps you can still find it online.

[Anon]

I'm mainly interested in the limits of a site running PHP/IMAP.

Do you have an URL to that article?

[Anon]

I'm mainly interested in the limits of a site running PHP/IMAP

Well, this was several orders of magnitude beyond that.

No URL (I read it in the paper copy of the mag); sorry.

[Anon]

Now that I think about it, it might have been Network Computing where I saw the article.

[Anon]

Try reading this: http://www.horde.org/papers/Scalable_webmail_HOWTO.html

IMP is a pretty good free webmail client.
The software on mailandnews.com is pretty good, although it 'aint free🙁