Requirements
•Windows Vista or later. That means it will work on Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 2003, Windows 2008, Windows 2008 R2, Windows 2012, Windows 2012 R2, Windows SBS 2003, Windows SBS 2008, Windows SBS 2011, Windows 2016, Windows 2017, Windows 2018, Windows 2019 etc, etc, etc or any later version. If Microsoft bring out a new version of Windows and it's not in this list, VPOP3 will work on it unless we say otherwise because it will work on Windows Vista or later. There are 32 and 64 bit (starting from v7.1) versions of VPOP3. The 32 bit version will work on either 32 or 64 bit versions of Windows. The 64 bit version requires a 64 bit version of Windows
•1GB RAM - it may work on less, but it may be slow. It will work better with more RAM
•1GHz processor. VPOP3 can use multiple cores/processors if available.
•100MB Disk space - it can be installed with 100MB disk space, but it will undoubtedly need more for data storage. How much will depend on many factors, such as how many users you have, how much mail will be stored on the server, whether you will be Archiving email etc. Also, by default VPOP3 will make daily backups of its own database, so you should have space to store these if possible.
•Internet connection (broadband or dialup)
•Web browser (Google Chrome & Mozilla Firefox are recommended, but it should work with Opera, Apple Safari and Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 or later)
Recommendations
•If you have large numbers of users using IMAP4 with VPOP3 Enterprise then you will probably find that the disk I/O will be the limiting factor before the CPU. This can be helped by having more free RAM available for disk caching, and having a faster disk I/O subsystem - e.g. SAS drives instead of SATA drives, RAID 10 arrays, hardware RAID controller with battery backed/non-volatile write cache, etc.
Things to watch out for
•We do not recommend using RAID 5 arrays. VPOP3 uses a database server (PostgreSQL), and RAID 5 arrays often encounter performance issues with databases, because of frequent small writes to the disk. With a RAID 5 array a write requires a read from all disks and then a write back to all disks. Generally, it is not recommended to use a RAID 5 array with databases which perform many writes to disk (as the VPOP3 database does).
•Take care if you are using 5400 RPM SATA drives. You will probably find that these are too slow to handle many users, because of the very slow access times.
•You should turn off any write-back caching on the disks on the VPOP3 PC. If you don't do so, then power failures (or hard shutdowns) may cause database corruption, requiring you to restore the database from a backup. The exception is if you have a hardware RAID controller with battery backed write cache (BBWC) or non-volatile write cache (NVWC). In this case, the hardware will remember any data waiting to be written back to the disk in the case of power failure, and will write it to the disks once the power is restored.
•Virus scanners can cause problems. If you install a third party virus scanner on the VPOP3 PC, we recommend that you exclude the VPOP3\pgsql\data folder (and sub-folders) from any virus scanning, and turn off any email scanning on that PC. If you want to scan emails as they are received by and sent by VPOP3, then either use one of our integrated virus scanners, or use a specialist email server virus scanner, rather than a normal desktop virus scanner.
•Backup software should not backup the VPOP3\pgsql\data folder unless it uses VSS (Volume Snapshot Service). If the files in that folder are accessed by other software, the database server used by VPOP3 may be unable to access the files when it needs to, causing database issues.
