[Dovecot] considering dovecot

[Ejay Hire]

I use YAA!  (yet another autoresponder) to handle vacation messages,, but I
feel the system could be made more efficient.  

When a user wants to set a vacation message, they go to a web page I
created, and login (ldap, apache, authentication via apache's
mod_auth_ldap).  When they read the page, it reads the vacation message if
any from mysql, and allows them to modify it.  (PHP)

When mail is received, postfix forks it to the mailbox and Yaa!.  This means
Yaa! Touches every message in the system.

I wanted to do it all in LDAP, but I figured out I wasn't smart enough to
make YAA!'s ldap support work, so I broke down and used Mysql.

In other news, Novell stopped contributing developers to Hula, the open
source exchange alternative today.

-ejay

-----Original Message-----
From: dovecot-bounces at dovecot.org [mailto:dovecot-bounces at dovecot.org] On
Behalf Of Rick Hazey
Sent: Tuesday, November 28, 2006 3:01 PM
To: dovecot at dovecot.org
Subject: [Dovecot] considering dovecot

Hi all.

I'm making a case to use Dovecot over Courier and would like some feedback.
I've searched the web extensively and have been unable to find any hard
information regarding Dovecot's IMAP performance. I've got some pressure to
use Courier but my gut tells me that Dovecot should be much faster. In
particular, I will have typical users with mailboxes exceeding 10,000 emails
and in some cases up to 100,000.  
Courier might be the "safe" choice but I'm not confident it can handle
inboxes with that many messages. Dovecot, with its indexes, should be much,
much faster. Can anyone point me to some benchmarks or production uses of
dovecot that bear this out?

 From my research, Courier maildrop appears to be what I need for local
delivery. Is it possible to use Maildrop for local delivery with Dovecot? Or
is the Dovecot LDA needed to update the maildir indexes?

I also need the capability for users to set their own vacation messages via
a web page. Maildrop looks to handle this easily (by allowing me to link the
maildrop filter to a file with the vacation
message) but I don't see similar capability with the Sieve plugin. I do see
where I can create a vacation message with Sieve but the text of the message
seems to be required to reside within the Sieve script. Perhaps I'm missing
something?

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.