As mentioned in our previous installment, when I installed this machine in Jan 2003, I started with the RedHat Enterprise Linux 3 clone of White Box Enterprise Linux 3. It has since switched to CentOS 3.
Our departmental e-mail server handles a lot of chores for us. It is where the mail for Mark, Todd, and myself goes. It also handles all the CRT mailing lists, such as ezRETS-users and newsletter-broker. We also have it host some virtual mailboxes such as our help line of info@crt.realtors.org.
The hardware is a dual Pentium III 700 with 2GB of RAM. Its slightly overpowered for most our needs. There are two situations that call for the heavy amount of RAM, at least: 1) When the mailing lists are very active and 2) when we have heavy incoming mail. With the mailing lists, every one mail coming in turns into a large number of outbound mails. With the incoming mail, we spam and virus filter them which can take a good amount of CPU time and active memory.
One of my goals in building this mail system was “ubiquitous e-mail access.” By that I mean that if I can get on to the Internet, I can check my staff e-mail. We achieve that by allowing access on three fronts: IMAP over SSL, POP3 over SSL, and a web-based IMAP client.
Continue reading ‘CRT’s Infrastructure Part II: The mail server’
