[General] Zimbra email server suddenly stopped working!!

Thu Nov 18 22:16:28 +03 2010

The advantage of quickly sending emails only truly comes into force if you have a large volume of user-to-user emails.

You can get the same speed in retrieving large emails by setting up an IMAP aggregator on your network - your in-house email server is basically doing the same thing when its delivering non-local emails.

The same can be said about sending emails. The end user sees this "speed" in sending the emails because you are only connecting to the local SMTP instance on your local machine. Again, if you are sending any emails out - the aggregate bandwidth (and by extension "speed") is the same. The only difference is that instead of your clients connecting directly to outbound MTAs, its your server that is connecting.

There are advantages though of having in-house email server. One of the main advantages is that you can do QoS on emails by setting up priority queues. So emails from say ceo at company.com to board at company.com have a higher priority; or emails from fianance@ with subject "Salary" have higher delivery priority.

In reality though, this only makes sense if you have a large user base and very large volume of emails. The truth is that if you monitor your queues (be it either local or SMTP) you'll see that 99% of the time the queue is empty (idle).

Other minor advantages of in-house email servers (but this is quickly being addressed by SaaS providers) is archiving/retrieval and other compliance actions. The "quick and dirty" way employed by many is you have a blackhole email which is relayed all emails.  Enterprise email compliance devices (and  hosted email providers) will give you more fine grain control, including things such as retention policy enforcement, encryption, etc.

Again, only makes sense if you have such requirements either from your own internal audits or by some external pressure (as is the case with banks and financials).

In your scenario, I would carefully analyze the true cost of hosting your own email service vs. deploying it on the cloud. Once you have done some basic profiling of your email use; I'm sure you'll realize that its actually cheaper to host it outside - especially considering the small number of mailboxes.

Regards,
--
Burhan Khalid
On 18 Nov 2010, at 18:25, Eng. Sabah Al-Sabah wrote:

> Majed,
> I do not need many email boxes, however having the server locally has its advantages, like quick retrieval of large incoming emails and quick sending as well.
> I also have mailman running locally.
> 
> Thanks for the tip any way.
> 
>    
> Best Regards,
> 
> ============================
> 
> Eng. Sabah Al-Sabah
> 
> General Manager
> 
> Technical Systems Est.
> 
> sabah at techsys.net
> 
> www.techsys.net
> 
> ============================ 
> <graphics1.gif>
> 
> On 11/18/2010 06:15 PM, Majed B. wrote:
>> 
>> Eng. Sabah, how many mailboxes do you have? Do you require having
>> emails on a local server?
>> Google Apps Standard is free and offers 50 mailboxes. It comes with
>> GMail, Sites & Docs. http://google.com/a/
>> 
>> On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 6:03 PM, Eng. Sabah Al-Sabah <sabah at techsys.net> wrote:
>>> Although I have been using it for a couple of years, I am not happy with it!
>>> It is an over kill, at least for my small organization. It takes too much resources.
>>> It is too complex to manage or update.
>>> It is not compatible with the stock email client on the android (Nexus One).
>>> 
>>> Today as I was struggling to fix this problem, I really considered trashing it and reverting back the old sendmail.
>>> But now that it is working again, I think I shall keep it!
>>> 
>>> Best Regards,
>>> 
>>> ============================
>>> 
>>> Eng. Sabah Al-Sabah
>>> 
>>> General Manager
>>> 
>>> Technical Systems Est.
>>> 
>>> sabah at techsys.net
>>> 
>>> www.techsys.net
>>> 
>>> ============================
>>> 
>>> On 11/18/2010 05:57 PM, Bashar Al-Abdulhadi wrote:
>>> 
>>> Yes 3650 for a decade. :D
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Speaking of Zimbra dunno why redhat sold them to VMware, it was picking up in the region pretty well!
>>> 
>>> 
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: "Eng. Sabah Al-Sabah" <sabah at techsys.net>
>>> Sender: general-bounces at oskw.org
>>> Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2010 17:52:16
>>> To: General OpenSource Discussion<general at oskw.org>
>>> Reply-To: General OpenSource Discussion <general at oskw.org>
>>> Subject: Re: [General] Zimbra email server suddenly stopped working!!
>>> 
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>> 
>> 
>> --
>>        Majed B.
>> 
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