On Mon, Jun 06, 2005 at 02:55:55AM -0500, Steve Block wrote: > On Mon, Jun 06, 2005 at 02:20:40AM -0400, Roberto C. Sanchez wrote: > >Short summary of popular IMAP servers: > >server why you would use it > >------ -------------------- > >UW IMAP You are a masochist > >Cyrus IMAP You need *serious* scalability (e.g., 100,000 users with > > accounts on 8 clustered servers using Cyrus Murder) > > You want to virtual host or setup mail accounts without > > requiring a corresponding shell account > >Courier IMAP You want low maint/like Maildir > >Dovecot New kid on the block; you like living on the edge > > I highly and heartily recommend cyrus. 20,000 messages in a folder? > 30,000? More (debian-user archive, anyone)? Want the server to handle > sorting your mail for you? Thanks to Debian it's pretty easy to set up, > and getting postfix to talk to it is cake. > Funny that you mention that. While those are all nice things, if you are not a full-time admin, maintaing a Cyrus installation for more than a couple of users gets to be a real pain. That said, if you are an ISP with a bunch of admins running around, the scalability is especially nice. I have seen posting to newsgroups and such on the net where people mention Murder clusters serving in excess of 250,000 users.
I originally picked it for my server because it was an old machine and I was worried about corruption or hardware failure and I didn't want a large mbox file getting trashed. To me, the really nicest feature of Cyrus is the duplicate delivery elimination. Until I switched to Courier last month, I had forgotten that people actually CC list mail. Cyrus does it by keeping a database of (I think) hashes of messages received within a certain time frame. Dupes are discarded. This is done primarily to stop floods from messages that are caught in loops with MTAs or whatever, but it also works with getting the same message muiltiple times on multiple mailing lists/CCs. > I also never liked both local and IMAP access to the same mail store. > It just seems dangerous to me. The fact that cyrus uses it's own mail > store that is not directly accessible is to me a feature. It also lets > users make filtering rules without understanding a rule writing language > thanks to sieve and the avelsieve plugin for squirrelmail. > To a degree yes. I found the mailfilter rules I started using with Courier to be more flexible. However, I wouldn't expect a newbie to deal well with it. > It may seem excessive if you're the only user, but it works so well that > if you're going to run your own IMAP server anyways it may as well be > cyrus. > Thankfully, the newer versions in Sarge are pretty good. I know that the version of Cyrus with Woody was absolutely attrociously old and finding anyone to help with problems with it or even docs about it was nigh impossible. > I did use Dovecot briefly to access a massive email archive from several > years ago. It was in maildir format and I wanted to move the entire > contents to my cyrus store. Worked fine then, and if you like maildir it > sure was easier to deal with than Courier (we didn't get along). > Though, if you are interested in moving from Cyrus to something that uses Maildir, I maintain the Debian package of cyrus2courier (which also handles Dovecot and other Maildirs). In fact, finding that little program was what made me finally take the plunge (and procrastination on a project that was due the next day at school, but I digress). -Roberto -- Roberto C. Sanchez http://familiasanchez.net/~sanchezr
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