Hans Wilmer said: > Ok, all this sounds good. Cyrus may be the more solid solution at > least. But some questions come up with it:
as a cyrus user on debian for 2 years now I can say that cyrus 1.5 is a ROCK solid mail server. Extremely fast, reliable, fairly easy to use, flexible etc. That said, I took a look at possibly replacing my cyrus 1.5 with a new cyrus 2.0 or 2.1?? from the unofficial debs and it just looks horrible to me. All this sasl crap, incompadiblities with LDAP authentication, and the complex install process/configure process gives it more then 3 strikes in my book. So if/when I decide to move on it will be to courier. I originally chose cyrus back in the day(a bit over 2 years ago I think) because courier as included with debian either did not have POP3 support, or the POP3 support was alpha/experimental. That is the only reason, I've stuck with it to date since I've never had a problem. below comments are related to cyrus 1.5 which is the current version in debian 3.0 as well as debian 2.2(nice thing about that was upgrading didn't have any glitches since the version didn't change at all :) ) > + Given that there are no local users, how do they authenticate to > access their email via IMAP? I use LDAP authentication via PAM. I have extensive documentation on how to setup & deploy such authentication at my LDAP site: http://howto.aphroland.de/HOWTO/LDAP > + What's the best way to do backups and restores? just tar up the user's mail folder(/var/spool/cyrus/mail/user/$USER). to restore it, extract the tar file, change the file ownership on all the files to match others(I think its cyrus.mail) incase the UID/GID is changed(e.g. restoring to another system), su to the user cyrus and run the command /usr/sbin/reconstruct -m which will rebuild the mailboxes file(it will scan and see the new mailboxes/mail), then run /usr/sbin/reconstruct -r user.$USER and that will rebuild that particular inbox. I have done at least 3 server migrations with cyrus and all were totally flawless, never a single problem. The process isn't entirely straightforward(the above is semi complex), but it works, and works well. Note my command line options for reconstruction may be incorrect, it's been nearly 6 months since i used it and thats off the top of my head. > + Can delivery to local users' ~/Maildir be intermixed with delivery > to cyrus' own mail storage? Can cyrus access files in ~/Maildir and make > it accessible by IMAP as it does with mail in its own storage? not that I know of. Cyrus uses it's own file store mainly for file locking, e.g. login multiple times to the IMAP server, login multiple times to the POP server and maintain data integrity. the file formats of maildir and cyrus are not at all the same, cyrus relies HEAVILY upon the indexes it generates, without the indexes cyrus will report you have 0 messages despite having all the message files there. Same goes for if the file permissions are bad. > + The server will have to accept mail for some.domain.de and > some.domain.com (whereby the 'some.domain.' part is always the > same). All users of some.domain.de are the same users as in > some.domain.com, and the envelope sender and From: information will > always be [EMAIL PROTECTED] So far, that's easy. Can cyrus deal with > that? from what I understand in your question, this doesn't involve cyrus at all, you just tell the MTA which user to deliver the mail to, and cyrus takes it from there. > Well, I'm not sure how to handle this in detail on the side of the MTA > yet (looks like it needs virtual domains), but what about cyrus? Afaics > yet, such a domain setup would be much easier to maintain when all users > were real local users. With unreal users and cyrus, I might very well > get into troubles I cannot quite imagine as of yet --- or into none at > all as it may be left solely to the MTA to > handle the different domains/groups of users. for reference, my home cyrus setup consists of a single account for authentication, and more then 60 other accounts which have no associated account(including the one I am posting from). I configured cyrus to give my primary account full access(via ACLs) to all of these 60+ other mailboxes, each is assigned a unique email address. This allows me to sort mail server side according to email address, since there is no way that the current postfix/cyrus can identify which email address something is sent to(in the case of a mailing list or being BCC'd etc, though newer versions of it apparently can, I'm stickin to stable). It also allows me to unsubscribe to my other email boxes and have them still collect email without it having to show up on my client. It works extremely well for me. At the moment I am subscribed to 17 other email "accounts"(with no local associated account). Using squirrelmail as my mail client, performance is good(provided I don't let mailboxes get too big). I haven't tried courier myself yet so can't reccomend for or against it, I hear it's good, I plan to investigate it further, but for me at least cyrus 2.x is a real bad solution. It seems flaky & has stupid dependencies on sasl(I can understand offering support for sasl but don't force it). if you use squirrelmail for webmail I reccomend installing php4-apc it improves SM performance by about 20x on my system. nate -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
