Re: On IMAP servers (was: Re: mutt + dovecot/squirrelmail + mbox ?)
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.
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.
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.
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).
--
Steve Block
http://ev-15.com/
http://www.steveblock.com/
scblock@ev-15.com
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