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As an ISP hosting multiple domains and having thousands of accounts, Exchange was out of the question. I started with Ipswitch's Imail back in 1997. It was good for a while, a long while... but there were a few fatal flaws. One of which is the way it stores mail. Each folder is one file. If you have 10,000 emails in your inbox, those are all in one file. If you delete one email, the server rewrites that whole file, minus the one email. If you're running in a virtual environment, especially with a SAN backend, you know why this is bad. Now, we found a nice piece of software called Visnetic Mail Server.... It keeps all emails in folders and each email is its own file. If you delete an email, the server whacks the file - Minimal Disk IO.

Right now we're migrating email off the old Imail server onto the new Visnetic server... It is going smoothly thanks to a nice migration utility provided by the makers of VMS - Deerfield.com. I'm finding that I have a ton of files now. Does anyone know the limit to the number of files one can have on a file system? We're running Windows Server 2003 with NTFS partitions, of course.