[Dovecot] Cyrus vs Dovecot

[martijn at youngguns.nl]

On Thu, 14 Aug 2008 10:42:49 +0200, Mathieu Kretchner
<mathieu.kretchner at sophia.inria.fr> wrote:
> 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?
You need to subscribe to the folders on the new server.
> 
> 
>> 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