[horde] Horde installation base and managed mailbox number as a requirement

[Fabio Pietrosanti]

Hi all!

I'm working on tender for offers (a project for a customer where there 
are multiple offer) for an important organization in italy.
The organization pose specific requirement on their documents and it's 
orientated explicity to a well known commercial email software (no 
exchange, no lotus notes).

Me and my coworkers proposed the same infrastructure, at least with the 
same functionality, using only opensource software.
This distributed infrastructure is made of imp/horde, postifx, cyrus 
imap, tim sieve, spamassassin, amavis, clamav, openldap, mysql, apache, 
php well integrated.

The organization posed as a requirement the availability of demostration 
of an installation base of at least 20.000.000 mailbox .

Opensource software have the serious problem competing with commercial 
software in the way it cannot demostrate market penetration or number of 
installation base simply because there are no license sold.

I asked the same question of installation base for postfix to Vietse 
Venema who suggested to see at outblaze.com who manage more than 30mln 
email account. It's a very usefull information but we need more 
"demostration" of the market penetration and installation base (at least 
in europe or with government or military organization) of postfix (and 
cyrus imap).

I also wrote to cyrus imap mailing list and waiting to get a reply.

Unfortunatelly in this situation numbers are important and opensource 
will not be allowed if we cannot propose "numbers".

The worst thing is that the commercial software say in their feature 
list "no line of opensource software". But damn, it's not a feature! I 
don't like them.

If someone could help, we are talking of a government email systems so, 
in my view of world, opensource is a mandatory choice.

Regards

Fabio Pietrosanti