Quoting Sam Drinkard <sam@xxxxxxxxxx>:
> I just looked briefly over some of the documents about cyrus-imap and
> that is WAY too much complication for a single, or at most 3 mailbox
> server. The dovecot config file was just about as bad. Unix is
> supposed to make things simple.. not complicated, or at least that was
> the original vision of Unix.. guess that has been lost.......
Well, Dovecot should work by just installing and starting it, without touching
any config files. Think of it as drop-in replacement for old wu-imapd.
Mainly
there for folks that want to have IMAP server quickly and with no fuss.
Cyrus requires couple of very simple config changes. I've described
all of them
in my previous email.
Number of users to support is irrelevant when deciding between Dovecot and
Cyrus. My email server has exactly three users on it (my wife, my 17
month old
son, and me). I'm running Cyrus on it.
One important thing people often don't think about is the *size* of
mailboxes. Cyrus scales well with both size of mailboxes and number of
users. Dovecot
would probably handle thousands of small mailboxes just fine. But let them
start growing and it would start falling apart (like anything else that uses
non-indexed Berkely style mailboxes would).
Cyrus is really just a message store. It doesn't use system accounts
at all. You could remove those three users from the system, and Cyrus
wouldn't care
about it. It would still accept emails for them as long as the mailboxes for
them exist, and users would still be able to connect to it and get
their email.
You would need to setup some other way to authenticate them then, of
course. Even in defualt configuraion in CentOS, Cyrus has no idea that
you are
authenticating users against local accounts. Cyrus simply passes
username/password pair to saslauthd, and saslauthd is configured (by default,
see /etc/sysconfig/saslauthd file) to check them against local user
accounts. If you ever decide to tighten security on your email server
by removing (really
not needed) users from the system, no problems with Cyrus. It was blisfully
unaware they existed anyhow.
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