Need to host 1,00,000 email boxes, have a query

[furquan]

Hello :

We have a query from a customer asking , If cpanel software is capable enough to support the hosting of one hundred thousand email boxes and if yes, What is the hardware capability that we should have to keep the server humming ?

[cPanelTristan]

cPanel does not have a limitation on the number of email accounts on a machine, so it is possible that many email accounts could be on a machine that has sufficient space, bandwidth and memory. I cannot personally state the hardware needed for this requirement, so hopefully someone else might have a better idea for that one.

[brianoz]

It depends completely on how much the email accounts are used, and what sort of access is used to read the mailboxes - POP, IMAP, how often they POP, etc. For instance, if IMAP, you may need to support 1,00,000 (is that 100K or 1M???) IMAP processes!! Or just not support IMAP.

You also need to think about issues about how you will stop SPAM, and how many emails each mailbox will receive.

Until you answer those questions, unfortunately you are asking an "unanswerable" question.

The issue of SPAM is very important as unblocked SPAM can multiply the load on a server 10x. You probably want to look at solutions like ASSP, Spamassassin during SMTP, etc etc.