Thrown into large system

Hello all,

I've been thrown into a very large mail system with clustered servers few MTAs, etc... Problem is by background is app dev not system administration. I feel a little overwhelmed, there is no doubt that I can learn the system and even improve on it, but i need guidance on where to start and how to quickly understand it. My top priority is to learn enough right off the bat that I can prevent any degradations. Also the previous administrator coded these scripts for business processes that I have no idea where they reside or where it's pulling the data from (and nothing is documented......I know...wtf). Any guidance is greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

Based on the information you've provided, my advice is to migrate your mail to Google Apps.

Beyond that, it'll be hard for anyone to offer any sort of advice or guidance without knowing some basic information like what operating system your servers run and what mail server you're using.

Obviously we can't really tell you anything about where your business process scripts reside or where they pull data from, especially without knowing what they actually do.

Mail servers are kind of a pain to administrate.

I would have to agree with Oreo, some administrators make a career out of managing mail servers. If you're background is in coding (sorry I'm not a coder so I use the term generically) you should not try to maintain their mail servers. Granted, once they're up and running they do tend to manage themselves quit effectively, but it may be worth looking into switching to a hosted solution depending on how many users/mailboxes are on the server? Either way we'll help you as much as we can.