[Dovecot] nfs director

[Cor Bosman]

Hi Noel,

> I do take exception to be told this issue can be fixed, but NFS users
> are not worth it, which is essentially what he told us, I dare say if

I guess he told you this in private? The way i understand it the 
index-over-nfs problem can not be fixed 100%. I know for a fact Timo
tried very hard to fix it, but NFS is what it is. And even if you can
fix it in one OS, say Linux, you'd have a dozen other OSs to cope with.
It is not only a dovecot problem, it is actually more of an NFS protocol
problem.

> installs :) Some NFS users here are of small size where they can see
> beneifits of using another program (director) to manage things, and dont
> care about it impacting their inbound servers, some do care, but yes
> when you get to large user numbers, well, we are engineers, not PR/Sales
> ppl, so we can by our nature see through the upselling of using it.

We dont use the director on our inbound servers either. We dont even use
dovecot-lda. In our experience this isnt really a problem. The imap
processes keep the indexes working well enough. So to answer Edward's
original question, No, i dont think you need to replace your Foundries.

> xs-for-all is not a welcome domain here for spam/idiots in the past it

We have over 300,000 DSL users. There's always idiots. But we're very
active in the anti-spam community. We even run multiple public mirrors
of all kinds of blacklists. If you send us a complaint, it will get
acted on. Scoring any largish ISP +7 in SA because you got some spam
in the past is kinda silly :) I cant imagine blocking a whole ISP because
you got spam from them. Wow. Our users would revolt. 

Im not selling the director at all. Quite the contrary. I think most people
wont need it. And I wish we didnt need it. It adds complexity, and that
sucks. I hate it :)  I think we actually agree there! :)

You're right, turning off indexing in the LDA has no impact whatsoever
on the delivery side. (again, we also dont use it there). But it does have
a slight impact on the frontend side. It means the imap servers need to
update the indexes every time they're out of date (which is basically every
time new email arrives). For us, this impact doesnt seem to be a problem.

Not having indexes does impact imap at a noticable level, especially for
large mailboxes. Ive seen 10+ second delays on large mailboxes while the
imap server is sorting the mailbox without the index. 

Basically, you're damned if you do, and damned if you dont. 

Cor