[Dovecot] rule of thumb for indexing overhead

[Christian Balzer]

On Wed, 29 Aug 2007 12:31:01 -0700 (PDT) "WJCarpenter"
<bill-dovecot at carpenter.ORG> wrote:

> > Also, are there any drawbacks of using exim to do the local delivery?
> 
> I'm very interested in the answer to this question, too.  So far I have
> found (through reading, not trying things yet) that Dovecot's quota
> handling is more flexible than Exim's (exim is pretty much limited to FS
> quotas, I think, which is no good for virtual users).  Dovecot's Sieve
> implementation has more features than Exim's.  Both of these happen to
> matter to me (and led me to Dovecot in the first place.)
> 
We use exim all the way to local delivery. And it handles Maildir++ 
quotas just fine. Depending on your actual needs and userdb/authdb 
choices the dovecot LDA might be the better choice. But exim can do
pretty much everything one needs (we don't use sieve) and the advantages
of indexing during delivery are negligible for us in general and
potentially negative in some scenarios (mass mail to many/all users).

> An upside for Exim doing the delivery is that you theoretically can
> arrange for some additional rejections to happen at SMTP time.
> Pragmatically, those additional rejections are typically not done at
> SMTP time anyhow (e.g., an explicit fail from a user Exim filter).
> 
I don't think there are many situations where a MTA can do better
than a LDA when it comes to rejections during SMTP time. Since at
least with exim local delivery happens in a separate stage AFTER
SMTP has been successfully completed.Now having consistent errors,
logs and configurations for all mail delivery stages is something
that might you want to stick with your MTA from the edge to the 
mailbox.

Regards,

Christian
-- 
Christian Balzer        Network/Systems Engineer                NOC
chibi at gol.com   	Global OnLine Japan/Fusion Network Services
http://www.gol.com/