Sending my DC to the cloud

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Hi folks, I’m seriously considering pushing my data centre in to the cloud rather then reinvesting in new hardware, I’ve run this beast for almost 20 years. So I’ve been poking around Linode, which I’ve used for a number of years for some projects and more recently to replace an aging dns secondary that worked out very well. My fear has always been replacing the email servers I host - currently 3 separate ones, which I’d like to consolidate down to one, multiple domain names, users etc.

So my question(s), is mail-in-a-box a good solution? It looks like the right fit for me and would replace the three existing servers as well as our anti spam gateways, and can be added to our existing linode portfolio. I’d really appreciate any real world feedback from anyone using it to host mail for multiple domains, also any tips for syncing existing customer data on our current servers with the potential mail-in-a-box system? obviously I’d like to make it as seamless a transfer as possible so we don’t get hit by hundreds of customer support cases all at once too!

I might have a /24 of ipv4 address space for sale soon…

Thank you.

Si.

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Hosting 11 domains on MiaB. The Ubuntu VM is scaled pretty large, 8CPU, 8GB RAM, 100G OS Drive
400G SSD for /home/ mounted separately. using a hypervisor on HPE DL360 Gen10. Each domain has only about 7-10 users. The solution works well for me.

Had several Google Apps for your Domain (G Suite) or (google workplace) accounts and consolidated into one MiaB server. Used drag and drop method for each account moving mail though Thunderbird. Worked well, sorta time consuming. imapsync is another option discussed in the forum a lot. I personally dont trust anything I can’t do myself. So the time sink in figuring out this tool and hosting it myself was about the same as manually migrating using mozilla thunderbird drag and drop method.

Best of luck in the cloud, personally I’d invest in the newer hardware.

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Thanks for your reply, I have around 2000 domains, 500+ IMAP boxes and around 500 websites to host, DC costs me around 1500GBP per month + address space with RIPE annually. I don’t want to use google, I’m just looking to ditch the DC and hardware so I can work from anywhere. I don’t want to have to go to the DC and plug in a kvm when there’s a problem. 3k + for a decent bit of hardware that’ll be worthless in a few years isn’t really on my agenda anymore. I’ve pushed a slave DNS server in to the Linode cloud and will run with that as a test for the time being.

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I am curious … what are you running hardware wise? I presume that you are co-locating one or more servers? How many actually?

I have several different thoughts here. How you actually do things is important. There is one HUGE downside that I see immediately with using MiaB. That downside is that you would have to personally admin the email accounts for all of your users. I don’t know how you do it now, but I can imagine that you do not want that responsibility. I am working with a colleague to create a solution to that problem, but we haven’t pushed forward as there really hasn’t been the need – maybe now there is?

IMAPSYNC is the only way to go for the migration. Whether you use MiaB or some other solution in the end, IMAPSYNC will handle this well.

I seriously think though that you will need to seek a different solution. If you’d like to join Slack and we can banter / brainstorm I’d be happy to do so with you.

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I think MiaB using SQLite is going to be limiting and you will end up with a high quantity of servers to manage, which may preclude domains with too many users for MiaB to handle since it will require a single instance. A better self-hosted option might be Modoboa.

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Thank you, checking out Modoboa, we run iredmail at the moment but this looks sooooo much slicker.

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I haven’t ever installed it, but one thing that attracts me is that there is a manual install option making it OS-agnostic AFAICT.

The maintainer is usually hanging around in their Discord.

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I’m running the setup now so will let you know how it goes, so far so good.

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Hi buddy, I have a sort of working version on modoboa up and running but there are a couple of issues I need to iron out, do you know if there’s a forum for it somewhere?

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They have a mailing list and Discord server listed in the GitHub project page.

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While you’re exploring, check out Mailcow. I have heard so much good about it compared to ANY of the other self-hosted options.

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When I looked at their docs, the memory requirements appear horrendous:

RAM usage examples

A company with 15 phones (EAS enabled) and about 50 concurrent IMAP connections should plan 16 GiB RAM.

6 GiB RAM + 1 GiB swap are fine for most private installations while 8 GiB RAM are recommended for ~5 to 10 users.

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Sheeshz, I knew that they were memory hogs but had no idea that they were THAT bad. It is my understanding though that Clam-AV is the major culprit.

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@Reprobate @ReprobateUK (I suspect that you’re the same person but in case not)

Another option is to farm out email to an ESP and not be arsed with it yourself. I can offer a couple of reasonably priced providers.

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I wish there were something like “PretendAV”, because the only reason I think anyone uses ClamAV is as a check-mark for security audits. I stopped using ClamAV and never looked back the second time I discovered it was eating incoming messages.

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Thanks, that might be an option. I tried installing Modoboa on centos 7 but decided to try mailcow as I couldn’t get modoboa to work properly. The other potential option is iredmail which I do run an instance of at the moment, it works pretty well.