North American Network Operators Group

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RE: pop server in an ISP environment

  • From: Roeland M.J. Meyer
  • Date: Tue May 30 14:31:35 2000

> Muljawan Hendrianto: Tuesday, May 30, 2000 3:38 AM
>
> thanks to everybody who has replied to my email !
> Yes, my sole concern is actually the performance of my pop
> server when my pop3 users base getting larger.
> But I think with a E250/220 running having 2 CPUs , 1MB of
> RAM, around 200GB HD I should be able to handle up to 20000
> pop3 users easily, shouldn't I ?

Are you sure that you have only 1MB RAM, or is that a typo? Did
you mean to say 1GB?

> Roeland, you mentioned in your email about XTND XMIT, may I
> know what is that ?

It is the means where a client can send mail via the POP3
channel, rather than SMTP. Some clients can do this, if it is
available. We have tested Netscape messenger and Eudora for this
feature. There are some serious benefits to this, like being able
to lock clients into a single POP host, forbidding them to see
other SMTP hosts, or ANY SMTP hosts. Thus, keeping all email
internal connections, internal.

It is part of en extended POP specification that is part of the
POP3 RFCs. Do a search through the IETF database for XTND XMIT.
Only two servers implement this however, qpopper is one of them.
Also, look in the qpopper source code. It is fully documented
there. That's where I found it the first time.

> And about HA for Qpopper, are you saying that you have HA
> agent for Qpopper ?

It is much more complex than that. We wrote a lot of code. But,
we are also a software development house. We did a fully
distributed architecture that apportioned users over a large
number of hosts, allowing us to keep the user load limited,
dependent on host capacity and expected load. I have heuristics
that calculate that. It is a front-end application system,
similar to what AOL has to run.