dovecot vs. courier vs. cyrus-imap

[Matthew Carpenter]

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I don't know anything about dovecot.
I know very little about Courier.
Cyrus-IMAP is the one I've gone with, but do not recommend for every-day
users.  The user interface is rather klunky, either Perl or a CLI front
end which of course requires you to log in as another user (another
password to remember).  In order to automate creation of accounts with
user ID's I've had to write scripts which are called after doing Webmin
tasks.  Since I didn't know Perl when I wrote them, they are done in
Expect/Bash.

Strengths of Cyrus over others like the default UW-IMAP:
* Store mail in Folders which hold other Folders
* Ties quite well to LDAP or PAM through SASL (auth flexibility)
* No user ID's are required on the box to have an email account
	(double-edged sword)
* Great for multi-domain hosting
* Mail-System "Partitioning" allows flexbility and power in administration
* Sieve is a great mail filter with a couple decent web-front ends


I guess my biggest complaint comes because all I wanted was UW-IMAP with
~ the ability to store mail in every folder, not just folders designated
for mail.  I was after a system which would just work, using the default
user authentication, not requiring the "creation" of any accounts or
other real management.  I also wanted to use Procmail because it is the
filter I knew and loved.

What I got was a very powerful email system with its own mail format,
high speed but complex, much more than I wanted.... something I had to
learn.

It's a mixed bag, but it is indeed powerful and fast.  Once you learn
it, Cyrus is pretty good.  But don't plan on doing all your admin
through Webmin unless you are doing all LDAP users (at least not at this
point without writing your own scripts/modules).


Michael Hipp wrote:
| Can anyone recommend one of these imap servers over the others?
|
| Thanks,
| Michael
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|

- --
Matthew Carpenter
matt at eisgr.com                          http://www.eisgr.com/

Enterprise Information Systems
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* Security Consulting, Incident Handling & Forensics
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