[Tfug] Which IMAP?

[Nicolas Lopez]

On Fri, Jul 12, 2002 at 03:51:39PM -0700, John E. Morrow wrote:
> I've noticed that my current distro has several IMAP daemons available
> as packages - including cyrus, uw, and courier. What would be the best
> choice to use with Postfix?
  They should all work just as well on Postfix. 
UW would probably the simplest to setup, and least scaleable.  UW shouldn't
require any setup, but unless you're running a patched version then it
doesn't support Maildir, or maybe a few other "more scaleable" storage
formats.  mbox format doesn't cope well with large mail boxes, at least
with UW-imapd.  It can take several seconds to open a 100M+ mailbox. 
  Cyrus, as I recall, is designed as part of the whole Cyrus mail system
which is meant to run on a stand-alone box with no direct user logins.  It
almost certainly will require adding email accounts separate from system
accounts.  There might be some patch/option to auto-create accounts after a
successful auth agains't an "outside" source, like your main passwd file.
  Courier is another complete mail system in which the IMAP daemon has been
split out.  I believe the separate mail accounts issue is there  as with
Cyrus, and should be handlable in a similar way.  Courier exclusivly uses
Maildir, which is something to think about when planing filesystems for the
mail server.  With only Courier-imap touching the maildirs it should be able
to keep a good cache of metadata and thus handle big mailboxes without much
trouble. Well, assuming the underlying filesystem doesn't choke on 10,000
files in a directory (*cough* ext2/3). 

  All in all, UW is nothing to setup but I've been thinking about/planning a
transition to courier at work because of the slow mailbox loading with mbox
files.

  - Nick Lopez
    kimo_sabe@atdot.org
--
"Yes, but they're sand monkeys!" - Cartman