Rick Hazey writes:
I'm making a case to use Dovecot over Courier and would like some
feedback. I've searched the web extensively and have been unable to
find any hard information regarding Dovecot's IMAP performance. I've
got some pressure to use Courier but my gut tells me that Dovecot
should be much faster.
You don't have a test machine you can try it on?
In particular, I will have typical users with
mailboxes exceeding 10,000 emails and in some cases up to 100,000.
Courier might be the "safe" choice but I'm not confident it can
handle inboxes with that many messages.
Courier will be near useless on a heavy usage machine with mailboxes with 5,000+ emails. It highly depends on how busy the machine is, but courier does not handle large amount of mails well.
Dovecot, with its indexes,
should be much, much faster. Can anyone point me to some benchmarks
or production uses of dovecot that bear this out?
I am working on testing and preparing a Courier to Dovecot move. As a test I put 15,000 emails in two mailboxes.. one in a Courier machine and one on a (much smaller machine) with Dovecot. For that test I was using a webmail program to connect to both. Dovecot took under a minute the first time (when it created the idexes).. and was near instantaneous thereafter (as long as no new mail came in). Courier just timed out the webmail client.. after several minutes of waiting.
From my research, Courier maildrop appears to be what I need for
local delivery.
I recommend you consider Dovecot's LDA "deliver".
Is it possible to use Maildrop for local delivery
with Dovecot?
Yes, it is possible.
I also need the capability for users to set their own vacation
messages via a web page. Maildrop looks to handle this easily (by
allowing me to link the maildrop filter to a file with the vacation
message)
Not sure how to do it with deliver, but I believe it is possible, but I have not looked at that yet.
Is this a new install or something you are migrating?