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# $Id: ABOUT.pod,v 1.1 2004/02/04 04:55:46 matt Exp $
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=head1 What's special about Mail::Toaster?

First, the Mail Toaster project is no longer a "here's how I did it" page, of which you'll now find an abundance of around the internet. First, a bit of history is in order. 

Back in late 2000, I needed a mail solution capable of hosting a 100,000 email accounts. There wasn't much in the way of virtual hosted mail solutions available then but I had already converted quote a few mail systems from sendmail to qmail to resolve scalability issues with sendmail (without investing suitcases of currency into hardware). The hosting company I was working for (Lightrealm (which became HostPro (which became Interland))) had hundreds of boxes running sendmail and it was a literal nightmare for them to maintain.

I build a clustered qmail system using a heavily modified version of vpopmail and soon after having one of our customers server get DoS'ed off the network, we switched it MX over to my cluster which very gracefully handled processing a mail storm of several hundred messages per second for the next couple days. The built enough confidence in our systems admin team that they consented to migrating all the many (and widely varied) mail products onto my cluster.

I published much of the instructions for building a Mail Toaster on my personal web site where scores of people found it quite helpful as there was very little published documentation on getting all the components to play nicely together. At the behest of many very satisfied mail admins, I created the toaster mailing list and greatly enhanced the documentation for the growing user community.

As the toaster community grew, many features were added so that the toaster would work in more diverse environments. Rather than packing the toaster pages with volumes of "if you want this, do this" style instructions, nearly all the decisions about how your mail system is built were moved into two centralized configuration files (toaster-watcher.conf and toaster.conf). 


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