Quoting Tim Wilson <wilson at visi.com>: > Hey everyone, > > Our school district has seen an enormous increase in the number of > legitimate and spam email messages in the last year. Compared to October > 2003, last month saw an increase of 35% for legitimate email. The number of > messages trapped by our spam filters went from 75,000 in October 2003 to > over 1,000,000 last month alone. Our existing system, a PowerMac G4 running > EIMS (Eudora Internet Mail Server) on OS 9, is buckling under the strain. We > have a dual-G5 Xserve on the way and plan to move all of our 2,000 users to > Postfix running on OS X. > > Most of our users are accessing their email via POP, although some are using > IMAP. Most of them download their messages to their computers, but quite a > few leave them on the server. We also have a mixture of OS 9, OS X, and > Windows XP machines around here. > > I was hoping that some of you may have experience moving a large number of > email users from one system to another. > > What did you do with incoming messages during the transition time? SMTP is resilient by design. If a server fails to send your server a message because it is offline it should queue the message for another attempted delivery at a later date. I can't recall, but I think Sendmail out of the box will try for five days before bouncing a mesage. Alternatively, you might want to look at having a secondary MX, your ISP might be able to provide this service, that would catch and queue the mail for you while your box is offline. The downside of a secondary MX is that it typically does not have access to your user database, and as such will accept anything sent to your domain, which will then be bounced by your mail server later, rather than rejecting it outright. > How did you move the mailboxes from the old system to the new one? Well, if I am thinking right you will have mailboxes and a spool queue to deal with. The spool queue being where mail is dropped by your MTA, and the mailboxes being the various IMAP folders. My experience on the MTA side has been moving from one Sendmail box to another, in which case you simply take down sendmail so no more messages are being dropped into the spool queue and then copy the spool queue from machine A to machine B. Netcat or rsync handle this quite nicely. I'm not sure how this will translate for your move. My experience from the mailbox side has been moving from uwimap on one box to uwimap on another, so there is no issue with mailbox formats, so just copy the home dir from A to B. What are you going to be using for your POP3/IMAP server on the new machine? Look into the possible mailbox format differences. > I'm just hoping to glean some wisdom from the gnarly old mail server admins > on the list in order to head off as many problems as possible. Our existing > system is on life support and I'm afraid we don't have a lot of time to make > this switch. > I don't know that I qualify as a gnarly old mail admin, but hopefully this gives you something to think about. Josh _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota Help beta test TCLUG's potential new home: http://plone.mn-linux.org Got pictures for TCLUG? Beta test http://plone.mn-linux.org/gallery tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list