Hi all, I know I will take some heat for this (as I know this is a cyrus mailinglist), but I'm going to offer some points for dovecot. I'm all for informed decisions, where one can weigh points against each other and decide on that basis. First of all, I have administrated both courier and cyrus imap in a production environment (with cyrus scaling up way beyond 100k mailboxes), and I have made recently some tests with dovecot (I haven't seen it yet in production), which I found quite interesting. I noticed that dovecot and cyrus don't differ that much in speed to each other. Both seem to excel at certain points, while being weaker at another. But overall the performance on a huge mailbox seemed to be comparable. Dovecot seemed to be slightly better at searching in the mailbox, esp. searching for common terms you have searched for before, selecting of single mailboxes and downloading all headers of a mailbox, while cyrus seemed to be slightly better in getting the structure of a mailbox (the "(FLAGS INTERNALDATE RFC822.SIZE ENVELOPE UID BODYSTRUCTURE)" fetch command, which seems to be commonly used by mailclients. What really intrigued me about dovecot was the ability to run on standard mailbox formats, which may not be much of an issue when running in a pure cyrus environment, but is a huge plus when migrating from another server. Especially the "self-healing indexes" which were built on first use of a mailbox, and not using a reconstruct. So getting dovecot to run was very simple. And I like programs which take a common format, and don't think they need to re-invent the wheel. Another thing which really intrigued me was the inherent cluster-ability of dovecot, which is a huge PITA to get to run on cyrus (as I have just implemented it a couple of months ago). Yet I only have read about it in the documentation, and not actually seen it in action. But at least they thought about running on a clustered file system........ And the last thing is SASL. Dovecot needs no SASL, it brings authenticators for a variety of sources, and offers postfix and exim auth mechs as well. This may be a very personal thing, but if I can work around SASL, I'm very, very glad about that. SASL may offer everything you may need in a century of running a mailserver, but getting it to run is just painful, and debugging is non-existant (at least the last time I tried to implement it, which is a couple of years ago. Since then I worked around the issue whereever I could). Cyrus has undisputed the broadest implementation of the IMAP protocol in the open source world, especially regarding shared folders. If you need that, there is no way around cyrus. It has a very broad user base, and has proven itsself to be quite solid in terms of scalability and stability. Dovecot has yet to prove that (at least to me). If I personally had the chance, I would give dovecot a shot, at least in a testing environment. But probably mostly out of curiosity, and because "Its new" ;) But except for the missing support for shared mail folders, I see no real reasons against dovecot, at least not for giving it a try. And please don't take this as a personal insult to all hardcore cyrus evangelist. I tried to be just and unbiased, and after all, it is MY PERSONAL OPINION. On this mailinglist, you don't need one more person voting for cyrus, there are enough of those........ ;) Jens ---- Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
