[CentOS] Which imapd?

Bruno S. Delbono Bruno.S.Delbono at mail.AC
Mon Oct 24 16:05:58 UTC 2005


jean-sebastien Hubert wrote:
> Karanbir Singh wrote:
> 
> 
>>jean-sebastien Hubert wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Cyrus is very hard to install/configure/manage.
>>
>>
>>Like I said before, I dont agree with that point of view at all -
>>Cyrus is an excellent imapd that scales very well, from 3 user systems
>>to 45,000 user systems ( the largest that I've seen, there are most
>>likely larger setup's out there ).
> 
> 
> 
> Just use google; you will see that Cyrus is hard to make it run correctly.

Just coz they don't know how to use cyrus doesn't mean it's hard to make 
it run correctly. I've installed it in an installation with anywhere 
from 2-3 mail accounts to over 100,000. I found cyrus to over perform in 
many different areas. If you prefer a more "accessible" message store, 
you might choose Courier. From some googling around here is the 
consensus of the differences between courier and cyrus

o Courier uses a standard mailbox format (Maildir), whereas Cyrus uses a 
   unique one.
o Cyrus comes with a proxy module for scalability. o Both support ACLs.
o Cyrus supports single-instance message store (Courier does not)
o Courier can be a bit easier to setup

With Cyrus' format, it's a "single message per file" format with the 
IMAP folder structure built in a directory structure, but each folder 
has an index file so that accessing the headers of a message (which is 
done very frequently, for example, when displaying the message summary 
window) is done very quickly. Having the headers indexed into a single 
file in each folder means that the server does not have to do an 
open/read/close for every message in a folder.

I use Cyrus because of it's speed and flexibility.

I think the general consensus is that Cyrus is _the_ enterprise IMAP 
server in the OSS world. It scales fabulously to large user bases. Even 
Sun iPlanet Messaging Server/Netscape Messaging server uses cyrus with 
some places with mail volume close to 10 million/day and about a million 
accounts (Source: Info-iMS Mailing List/google)

PS - Did I mention the speed? It's FAST!!!

My 2 cents.



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