You are lucky about POP and IMAP, we have hourly calls, chats and daily tickets for issues around it. Customers demanding updates and fixes. We are hoping ST has fixes soon. While some of the updates pushed out have fixed some of the NTLM issues, we are still having a good amount of clients complaining of Outlook issues and other items, IE, we had Outlook on macOS completely crashing, this has been fixed in a custom build provided to us.

If the POP3/IMAP issues were resolved, it would be perfection minus a few other issues. MAPI for me in my tests, worked great to download messages, but no longer downloads new messages.

EAS has always been wonky for some reason, many complaining of sync issues, showing unread items when a folder had none (mainly with iOS). Right now though, it seems like it is working, we are not receiving any reports of problems. ST always told us it was an iOS/EAS issue, but the client that was having the most problems, came from O365 where he said he didnt have the issue, eventually, he did cancel and move back to O365 where he happily emailed me about 4 months later saying the unread email count issue hadnt returned.

EWS on eM Client and Apple Mail on macOS, in my tests and others have been perfect, no issues that I can speak to at all.

I assume you do not use outbound gateways? Appears that the MAPI beta has an issue sending forwarded messages through the outbound gateways, normal emails seem to go just fine. If you enable them, all the forwarded messages just back up in the "Waiting for Delivery" queue and never leave.

Same issue in POP and IMAP as EchoDreamz here...

Shaun, one 6-core and 8GB of memory works for thousands of users in your experience? Do you find that the web interface is reasonably fast with those specs? Do you mind sharing if your VMs are running on SSD or SAS/SATA? Only reason I ask is that before I make the jump to v17 I intend to roll out a new VM. I only have about 500 users and 30 domains, give or take. I was planning on assigning more "horsepower" than that even for my much smaller workload. Maybe my plans were overkill...

Thanks,

Matt

With the caveat of *when SmarterMail is running as designed* (ie there's not a bug in the current version causing a degradation which would get fixed in a subsequent update), our VM is more than ample for our current workload.  The host machine is using all SSDs.

That being said, the other thing I'd caution is that workload is measured in different ways.  The number of inbound / outbound emails would also be a factor.  Our mail server is coupled with our own web application and due to that our mail server would see peaks when there's bad weather, but even with the peaks we've never seen an issue.  Here's the bandwidth overview report for the past few months:

Message Traffic:

Thanks. Awfully kind of you to share the info.

Matt

Shaun,

Thank you for sharing the info.

We've been running v17 on a VM on 8 Cores and 24GB RAM for @ 270 domains and several thousand users and even though CPU usage has dropped dramatically in recent v17 updates from @ 99% to < 20% (Memory usage has stayed pretty constant at 44%) and although it is only half as bad as it was in earlier v17 releases we are still seeing unusually high I/O with 10-16 Current Disk Queue Length times and high %Disk Read/Write Time with almost 0 %Idle Time on a SAS Raid10 Array compared to v16 (and we only have a quarter of the Incoming & Outgoing traffic that you do...and offload Spam Filtering to our Incoming Gateways on top of that). I guess it may be time for us to consider upgrading to SSD Array.

Keeping fingers crossed that once the Beta goes Live there aren't POP/IMAP issues as some others are reporting. Glad to hear that it has been going well for you so far. (Knock on wood)

@Scarab we have around 20k users and our disk IO with the current beta build is really nice. We too are a RAID10 SAS array. We are 24 cores with 64GB of RAM.

Here is a 24hr sample of our disk queue length.

You can ignore the spikes at 12AM(ish) and 4:30AM(ish), those are related to our backups.