IMAP Server recommendations ...

[Bill Campbell]

On Wed, Jan 25, 2006, Matthew Carpenter wrote:
>On Saturday 14 January 2006 13:38, Ken Moffat wrote:
>>
>> I use squirrelmail with dovecot and postfix, and it just works on this
>> small home server, only a few users. The config for squirrelmail has a
>> section for dovecot that you can un-hash and it works.
>
>I had a second to look back over emails I've missed on the list (sorry, don't 
>get much chance to read you guys), and found it interesting that Cyrus wasn't 
>mentioned much.
>
>It's no surprise.  Managing Cyrus is not for the faint of heart, since it 
>really seems like a Mail server Component than a system, intended to be 
>controlled by some Perl front-end.  That's basically all the tools are, cli 
>tools written in perl giving a bit of power if you know how to wield it.

I've looked at Cyrus, and chose to go with courier-imap because of the
Maildir storage as opposed to Cyrus' somewhat similar, but not really
method which involved hash indexes (Berkeley DB if I remember correctly).

...
>I have heard a mix of good and bad about Courier, and will likely try it 
>someday.  It seems the "other" OSS IMAP provider good enough for the 
>enterprise.  IIRC, it doesn't integrate with anything easily, though.  Isn't 
>it somewhat of a black box, providing it's own everything?  

My project this week has been to implement a system at a fairly large
regional ISP using multiple Linux servers, all of which can accept SMTP
mail, putting it in user's $HOME/Maildir stores on a central NFS server.
The servers are authenticating using openldap, and any server can receive
mail for the domains, and can provide POP and IMAP access to the users as
well.  This scales well, simply by setting equal distance MX records for
the domain, it automatically balances the load across multiple servers.

Bill
--
INTERNET:  bill at Celestial.COM   Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/   PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
FAX:           (206) 232-9186   Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676
http://www.celestial.com/

You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a
reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating
the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for
independence.
        -- Charles A. Beard