Code Crafters

Bit of a general question really this, and I know a little like asking how long is a piece of string but I'm just trying to get a feel of how many email accounts and amount of mail queue etc that Ability can generally deal with, without starting to struggle.

You see, at the moment we have approx 150-200 domains and 700 email accounts on our system, and an average outgoing mail queue at the moment of 3200 at any one time at the moment (because a few clients had catch-all accounts with autoesponders on, hence truck loads of autoresponder messages being sent out to non-existant spam email addresses in the last day or so), although this seems to be running perfectly fine with these amounts of accounts etc, it would be nice to know if anyone is running higher amounts than this so it kind of gives me an idea of how far it can go before screaming for help ?

Since we also offer backup mail services with this server, the outgoing message queue could increase significantly in a short space of time, so having an idea of whats its capable of will help towards how many accounts and services we can comfortable provide with it?

This really depends on the hardware you have but based on modern hardware (less than a year old), the system should be able to cope with up towards 20,000 users per server. The number of mails in the outgoing mail queue should be quite comfortably up to 10,000 but I believe up to 20,000 should be fine. In the future we do plan to rework the code that runs the outgoing mail queue and so vastly increase this capacity.

Rob,

Does the 10k-20k outgoing messages mean daily? Do those figures still apply?

The reason for my question is that we are looking at doing email blasts to our clients which could mean a list of about 30k-40k messages for one blast.

Is the Ability Mailserver running on an XP Pro box up to the task? What would your recommendations be?

Thanks in advance,

Scott

If the blast of mails is spread over a period of hours (upwards to a day), then AMS should be able to cope. If all those mails were accepted at once then the outgoing mail queue may become overloaded. The reason for this is that the mail server is not desigend for mass mailing purposes, but more for normal mail hosting patterns. Of course we do plan to improve this area of the mail server in a future update but I cannot give an estimated date when this could be available.