[Dovecot] Cyrus vs Dovecot

Mathieu Kretchner mathieu.kretchner at sophia.inria.fr
Thu Aug 14 11:42:49 EEST 2008


Ed W a écrit :
> Mathieu Kretchner wrote:
>> kbajwa a écrit :
>>> Hello:
>>>
>>> I think you are missing a point which is most important, i.e., what 
>>> type of
>>> support Cyrus vs Dovecot offers. In my experience:
>>>
>>> Cyrus      =  0
>>> Dovecot    =  100
>>>
>>>
>>> My personal experience.
>>>
>>> Kirt
>>>
>> I guess you've right but I can't post this answer at Cyrus mailing 
>> list.  I'm just trying to have my own opinion of imap server and I 
>> already have sarcastic answer on the cyrus mailing list !
> 
> Reading the cyrus list I think the above quote might be a bit unfair and 
> accidently crossposted?
> 
> In any case I only have experience of dovecot and it's used in some 
> larger installs such as the old webmail.us, now 1&1 (I believe).  I 
> think your installation is probably large enough that you might want to 
> do a trial migration of a couple of accounts and see if migration is a 
> problem.  

I'm trying to migrate my own account from cyrus to dovecot with the 2
tools which seems to fit the most my needs :

cyrus2courier :
Work fast and well but I must use cyrus2courier-1.5.ts and I have 2
problems with it : falg unseen (or seen if I want) for all e-mail / Sub
folders of Inbox are invisibles (I see them on the File System) !

imapsync :
Must add a transition configuration to dovecot in order to have user
passdb file (or master user) but once done it's ok and work correctly.
I've just tested a transition and I'm happy to see it keeps all flags
(seen/unseen too) and timestamp but as cyrus2courier, I can't see my
inbox sub folders although I could see them (full) on the File System?


> Certainly for all new servers I would STRONGLY recommend some 
> sort of virtualisation option (I use linux vservers, lots of other 
> options available).  This makes it fantasically easy to boot up (say) 
> three instances of your target software installation, perhaps all with 
> different configuration options and compare them easily.  I used this as 
> a solution to migrate from Courier and also recently when I was 
> migrating from 32bit to 64bit guests - essentially you spin up your new 
> guest, get it all ready, test it like made and then in a couple of 
> seconds you can down the live guest and boot up the new guest.  I 
> separate out all signficant data from the guest partition so try to keep 
> the actual installations under a couple hundred MB each (even that feels 
> bloated, but hey) and this makes it simple to boot up a copy of a guest 
> to test some change without having to copy too much
> 
> I personally picked dovecot because I worried about the horror stories I 
> read about with cyrus.  However, both are clearly the two best options 
> available for opensource solutions right now and both are used in large 
> installations so you should be very happy with either.
> 
> With regards to functionality it would appear (I don't use cyrus) that 
> cyrus has more "admin tools" to do stuff, but Dovecot is built to be 
> more "hackable", for example you can easily run a script before each 
> (imap, etc) login and hence do some very advanced stuff through that 
> route.  Plugins also appear to be quite easy to write to extend dovecot 
> in new directions
> 
> On the cyrus list they mentioned email retention policies.  Now some 
> people are going to say that this is really a job for the MTA 
> (postfix/sendmail/etc).  However, you have some plugins which might get 
> you partly towards solving that need, but nothing out of the box which 
> would give you a cast iron (stand up in court) kind of archiving 
> control.  However, you can get close I think
> 
> Ed W


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