Manchester LEA

Needed to provide cost effect web based email for all teaching and support staff in Manchester LEA schools. This has now been expanded to cover all pupils (managed via the school's postmasters). It is also intended to cover LEA officers.

Cost effective, depth of knowledge, software designed to run on unix.

The cluster consists of 15 rack mount servers running in a LOAD balanced and high availability (HA) configuration.

The primary mailstores run on 2 HA servers providing NFS and MySQL services. The smtp relaying is provided via 3 LOAD balanced (via LVS) servers running qmail integrated with amavisd-new to provide spam (via spamassassin) and virus scanning (via antivir FROM H+BEDV) services, all the accounts are virtual accounts managed FROM the MySQL database via vpopmail.

Per domain postmasters are available allowing schools to manage their own domains for most basic requirements such as resetting passwords, adding and removing users, and setting up mailing lists.

All the software came nicely package INTO rpms which can be found at qmailtoaster.clikka.com

The webmail service went INTO production on 28/04/03 there have been no reports of any issues so far.

It is intended to allow those schools that want to migrate there per pupil email to this system as well.

All software is freely available, I will be doing some additional notes and diagrams when I get a chance.