[re Dovecot as an IMAP server]
Adam wrote:
On Fri, 9 Jun 2006 20:39:24 +0200 Joachim Schipper <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Does it even work on openbsd yet? Its got a long history of corrupting
indexes, and spinning out of control sucking up 100% of the CPU.
I first read this out-of-order... "sounds like they are talking about
Dovecot" was my first thought...
There is a port, and I've been running it for about a year now. Never
had any problems, except that upgrading 0.9.x to 1.0 beta y required
rm'ing all indices or strange things happened.
Of course, this is on two boxes with respectively 1 and about 20 users,
so it's not that good an indication; but it does not crash at every
opportunity.
I do use it with maildir, though; mbox support may be less good.
>
I used the packages too. And with maildirs. It didn't crash, it just
kept corrupting its indexes and then using 100% of the CPU. It could be
fixed now, I don't know.
Adam
I haven't seen it do the CPU sit-and-spin in a long time (it did prompt
me to put a dual processor machine in place for my IMAP server...it only
killed one processor at a time! :), so I think that is fixed. However,
it still has issues.
Let's forgive the sit-and-spin.
Let's forgive the corrupted indexes (even though from the first day I
used it, the author claimed its indexes were "fail safe". I can't tell
you how "safe" I felt on many, many occasions with it).
Let's forgive the upgrades where I kept wondering, "Is THIS going to fix
things, or is this going to be even worse than the last upgrade? How
much mail will I lose THIS time?"
It is much better than it was. It is going in the right direction. But
it still has issues.
Want a seemingly reliable demo? Try this:
Set it up on a machine to do IMAP/SSL. Push 2000 e-mail messages from a
local mail client to your IMAP server. Somewhere between message 3 and
1000, it will hang, then time out on you. Switch to non-SSL, it will
work fine. Switch back, hang-time-out. Exact same results on Outlook
Express and Thunderbird, on multiple workstations, and multiple servers.
BTW: if you are trying to convert from local e-mail to centralized
IMAP storage, that hang-and-timeout SUCKS BIG-TIME...you will either end
up with duplicates in the IMAP server or spend hours trying to figure
out which ones made it and which ones didn't.
After switching my purely in-house system from SSL to non-SSL with
dovecot, I must say it Sucks Less, but I'm going to be doing at home
what I did with the project I'm working on at work: Give up on Dovecot.
The last straw for me was seeing a note from someone seeing the same
problem I was seeing, a reply from the author saying, "I guess the SSL
stuff still isn't working"...then a new (and current) release, which had
the exact same problem. I give up. I tried. I really did. Several
years of patience. It is getting better, but I'm not betting my
reputation on it yet.
And yes, Maildir, packages when available, ports when testing new
releases before packages were made. The author says the right things.
The results say the wrong things. 8-/
Yes, Courier IMAP is more complex. However, it took far less time to
get going than I spent fighting with the Dovecot SSL problem. I really
wish I hadn't believed all the "Courier is too complex" stuff before.
It isn't that bad, and not only have I had no issues so far, some of the
things I wasn't really blaming Dovecot for got a lot easier, too.
Yeah, I know, there are people using it without problem. Great. Didn't
work for me...over and over. Maybe I do cruel and unusual things with
IMAP, but I didn't think THAT horrible...
Nick.
