On 11/3/03 7:29 PM, "Tom Allison" tallison@tacocat.net wrote:
Scott Klein wrote:
I've been doing research on switching our current e-mail server (qpopper, sendmail) to imap. The decision on which server to use is essentially down to Cyrus and Dovecot -- I like Cyrus' approach to a lot of things, but the "blackbox" nature of it makes some niceties like using spamassassin and procmail difficult, or at least counterintuitive. Dovecot seems to play nicer with other apps.
I'm a bit concerned with stability, though. Although we don't have a lot of users (about 60) they're all very big e-mail users -- my users rely on their e-mail more than on their phones. We can't afford any downtime, and with our pop3 server, we haven't had any.
Does anybody on this list use Dovecot to serve mission critical e-mail to an entire company? What kind of uptime can I expect? Is it genuinely ready for prime time? Has anybody here migrated from a recent release of Cyrus and can compare apples-to-apples?
Many thanks, Scott Klein
I can only provide some input.
It seems to me that cyrus does have something of a black box approach to doing things. However, it's still in a maildir format although not in the typical ~/Maildir location.
With regard to procmail/spamassassin support I have the following recommendation, and it can be applied to both cyrus and dovecot (I think).
You do not mention what SMTP system you are using, I will assume you are sticking with sendmail and changing qpopper to some IMAP server. However, I would suggest you consider postfix in place of sendmail. And yes, it's very ready for mission critical.
There is a package called amavisd-new which allows you to set up an anti-virus scanner and spamassassin as an extension of postfix. This can process email before it's delivered from postfix to where ever (procmail/lmtp/...)
This simplifies some things in that the mail, as delivered to the MDA has already been "bagged and tagged" as spam, virus, good/bad and you can use procmail/sieve equally effectively for filtering from there.
downside with cyrus-imap and sieve is that you cannot "shell" out and do anything else with your email, like report spam to Vipul's razor. In the battle against spam, it can be very important to be able to take immediate actions against spam in many cases. Procmail allows you to do much of this on the fly. Sieve can't.
The other downside, for me, is that cyrus has poor documentation.
The advantage with cyrus is that it can be, from what I'm told, easily administered from web pages.
I'm still new with this dovecot thing and I technically haven't even gotten it to compile/run correctly. However some advantages that I do see with it are: ~/Maildir based, so it's not rocket science. very lean and simple to run. procmail friendly. awesome technical support with patient developer-dudes on hand.
Second that. I replied to Scott personally, but it's worth mentioning to the list, I think -- I've been running Dovecot/Postfix/amavisd-new for a couple of months now, and have had no problems. It took a few days to get it set up, but once I did, it hasn¹t needed to be touched. It's a money system. And find me a developer better at keeping on top of support and development than Timo and I'll buy you a beer ;-)
- Ian