[Dovecot] Dovecot vs Couir-IMAP

[Marten Lehmann]

Hello,

> But I'm confusing between Courier-IMAP and Dovecot. Anyone tell
> me some quick tips regarding this issue. What's the better and
> what's the worst thing comparing these two IMAP/POP3 servers?
> I think the Dovecot is good enough for security and performance
> issue over Courier. Is it right? And how about the feature
> comparision?

let me tell you from my experience that dovecot is the best imap/pop3 server
to start. It is very fast due to its indexes and has more options to configure
than Courier and is still very easy to understand and flexible. We once moved
from dovecot to Courier because we expected it to work better with NFS, but we
decided to move back to dovecot again very soon, because there is no option in
Courier to have all imap subfolders in one level, instead everything is below
"INBOX." which is not what most people are used to from hotmail.com or
Outlook. Also, Courier doesn't have an index which makes it slower. And the
mailinglist is not as helpful and friendly as the dovecot-ml. If you plan to
check for quotas then you should begin to deliver messages with dovecots local
delivery agent. Otherwise summing the sizes of all files in your mailboxes on
each delivery of a new message to a mailbox will slow down your machine
dramatically if you have a lot of messages and concurrent requests/users.

We have moved to cyrus in between, because it has a lot features that dovecot
won't have in the near future (like shared mailboxes or delayed expunge,
replication etc.), but it is very hard to set up and makes only sense in big
installations. For the start maildirs and dovecot are an ideal setup, easy to
maintain and very fast and stable.

Regards
Marten