[Dovecot] Dovecot vs Couir-IMAP
I'm the beginner for IMAP/POP3 servers. I'm starting to use Dovecot. But I'm confusing between Courier-IMAP and Dovecot. Anyone tell me some quick tips regarding this issue. What's the better and what's the worst thing comparing these two IMAP/POP3 servers? I think the Dovecot is good enough for security and performance issue over Courier. Is it right? And how about the feature comparision?
Best regards,
Erdenebat Guntomor/ /mailto:RkLogin@gmail.com
Hello,
But I'm confusing between Courier-IMAP and Dovecot. Anyone tell me some quick tips regarding this issue. What's the better and what's the worst thing comparing these two IMAP/POP3 servers? I think the Dovecot is good enough for security and performance issue over Courier. Is it right? And how about the feature comparision?
let me tell you from my experience that dovecot is the best imap/pop3 server to start. It is very fast due to its indexes and has more options to configure than Courier and is still very easy to understand and flexible. We once moved from dovecot to Courier because we expected it to work better with NFS, but we decided to move back to dovecot again very soon, because there is no option in Courier to have all imap subfolders in one level, instead everything is below "INBOX." which is not what most people are used to from hotmail.com or Outlook. Also, Courier doesn't have an index which makes it slower. And the mailinglist is not as helpful and friendly as the dovecot-ml. If you plan to check for quotas then you should begin to deliver messages with dovecots local delivery agent. Otherwise summing the sizes of all files in your mailboxes on each delivery of a new message to a mailbox will slow down your machine dramatically if you have a lot of messages and concurrent requests/users.
We have moved to cyrus in between, because it has a lot features that dovecot won't have in the near future (like shared mailboxes or delayed expunge, replication etc.), but it is very hard to set up and makes only sense in big installations. For the start maildirs and dovecot are an ideal setup, easy to maintain and very fast and stable.
Regards Marten
On Fri, 2007-03-09 at 01:41 +0100, Marten Lehmann wrote:
We have moved to cyrus in between, because it has a lot features that dovecot won't have in the near future (like shared mailboxes or delayed expunge, replication etc.),
Delayed expunges are already in Dovecot: http://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/Lazyexpunge
Hello,
Delayed expunges are already in Dovecot: http://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/Lazyexpunge
but it seems to work differently. In cyrus just the index entries are changed so no work on the filesystem is involved (only once for the index file). dovecot seems to move the deleted files to another folder which causes disk load.
Regards Marten
On Fri, 2007-03-09 at 18:28 +0100, Marten Lehmann wrote:
Hello,
Delayed expunges are already in Dovecot: http://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/Lazyexpunge
but it seems to work differently. In cyrus just the index entries are changed so no work on the filesystem is involved (only once for the index file). dovecot seems to move the deleted files to another folder which causes disk load.
Yea. Depends on what you wanted from the feature. :) It's not really possible to implement it the same way with mbox/maildir. dbox does support just marking messages expunged, but it doesn't support giving access to them in another namespace.
Delayed expunges are already in Dovecot: http://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/Lazyexpunge
but it seems to work differently. In cyrus just the index entries are changed so no work on the filesystem is involved (only once for the index file). dovecot seems to move the deleted files to another folder which causes disk load. If the file and the destination are on the same filesystem, then moving a file should cause almost no disk activity at all. I would guess that it actually uses _less_ than updating an index file. (It certainly is
Marten Lehmann wrote: the same order of magnitude, which is very very small in comparison to actually deleting or copying a file.)
Ethan
--
Ethan Sommer Systems Administrator Gustavus Adolphus College 507-933-7042 sommere@gac.edu
Erdenebat Gantomor wrote:
I'm the beginner for IMAP/POP3 servers. I'm starting to use Dovecot. But I'm confusing between Courier-IMAP and Dovecot. Anyone tell me some quick tips regarding this issue. What's the better and what's the worst thing comparing these two IMAP/POP3 servers? I think the Dovecot is good enough for security and performance issue over Courier. Is it right? And how about the feature comparision?
A couple of years ago I looked around at the various IMAP servers, and wound up using Dovecot for one very basic reason: It took me no time at all to build, install, configure, and get running.
It was, by far, the simplest thing to configure.
Now, admittedly, I have fairly modest requirements of my IMAP server, and over time Dovecot's feature list has grown, but as I look at the current configuration guide/options, it's still fairly clear and obvious what you need to do and why.
So, it suits a small install... but as quite a number of people on this list will vouch, it can scale to supporting many hundreds of thousands of users, with lots of auth and quota options, etc etc.
It's simple for simple tasks. It's powerful and flexible for larger tasks. That's not an easy balance to achieve.
-- Curtis Maloney cmaloney@cardgate.net
I used to use Courier-IMAP because I thought it was a great ideal to
have something that followed a standard so closely. But, Courier was
slow. It was a pain to install and worse to upgrade. And while it's
author was usually correct, his rigid motto of "supporting
incompetence just breeds more incompetence" wasn't very helpful when
my server was the only one that my IMAP clients wouldn't work with.
On Mar 8, 2007, at 4:34 PM, Erdenebat Gantomor wrote:
I'm the beginner for IMAP/POP3 servers. I'm starting to use
Dovecot. But I'm confusing between Courier-IMAP and Dovecot. Anyone tell me some quick tips regarding this issue. What's the better and what's the
worst thing comparing these two IMAP/POP3 servers? I think the Dovecot is
good enough for security and performance issue over Courier. Is it
right? And how about the feature comparision?Best regards,
Erdenebat Guntomor/ /mailto:RkLogin@gmail.com
On Fri, 09 Mar 2007 08:34:36 +0800 Erdenebat Gantomor rklogin@gmail.com wrote:
I'm the beginner for IMAP/POP3 servers. I'm starting to use Dovecot. But I'm confusing between Courier-IMAP and Dovecot. Anyone tell me some quick tips regarding this issue. What's the better and what's the worst thing comparing these two IMAP/POP3 servers? I think the Dovecot is good enough for security and performance issue over Courier. Is it right? And how about the feature comparision?
A while back, I was trying to configure Courier to use a MySQL database. It wasn't working, and I couldn't figure out why. After a bit of head-scratching, I decided to try the new thing that everyone was talking about, Dovecot (which was then at version 0.99). It still didn't work, but it told me why, and within an hour, it was working. :)
As an added benefit, with postfix 2.3 or later (or a patched postfix 2.2), it replaces Cyrus SASL for SMTP authentication, and is vastly simpler to configure.
I don't think the Courier configuration is terribly complicated, but I also don't recall it having quite so many features as Dovecot. Which is certainly not to say that Dovecot configuration is in any way complicated.
-- Marshal Newrock Ideal Solution, LLC - http://www.idealso.com
Hi,
i also use courier-imap in a bigger configuration with database access and everything normally used. Iam actually planning to switch to dovecot, courier looks for me not very well implemented, the documentation lacks many features and its not very performant in large environment, client actions are often consuming 99% of the cpu where the process is running, so if you only have a uniprocessor machine it could easy get critical.
I have not yet tested dovecot in productive environment but i will do this soon, i will report the result if requested.
With the configuration of courier i had never any problem, so from that ni cant prove your experience.
Frank
Marshal Newrock wrote:
On Fri, 09 Mar 2007 08:34:36 +0800 Erdenebat Gantomor rklogin@gmail.com wrote:
I'm the beginner for IMAP/POP3 servers. I'm starting to use Dovecot. But I'm confusing between Courier-IMAP and Dovecot. Anyone tell me some quick tips regarding this issue. What's the better and what's the worst thing comparing these two IMAP/POP3 servers? I think the Dovecot is good enough for security and performance issue over Courier. Is it right? And how about the feature comparision?
A while back, I was trying to configure Courier to use a MySQL database. It wasn't working, and I couldn't figure out why. After a bit of head-scratching, I decided to try the new thing that everyone was talking about, Dovecot (which was then at version 0.99). It still didn't work, but it told me why, and within an hour, it was working. :)
As an added benefit, with postfix 2.3 or later (or a patched postfix 2.2), it replaces Cyrus SASL for SMTP authentication, and is vastly simpler to configure.
I don't think the Courier configuration is terribly complicated, but I also don't recall it having quite so many features as Dovecot. Which is certainly not to say that Dovecot configuration is in any way complicated.
Yes of course. I will be glad if you will give me a that report. Thank you
Best regards,
Erdenebat Guntomor/ /mailto:RkLogin@gmail.com
Frank Doege wrote:
Hi,
i also use courier-imap in a bigger configuration with database access and everything normally used. Iam actually planning to switch to dovecot, courier looks for me not very well implemented, the documentation lacks many features and its not very performant in large environment, client actions are often consuming 99% of the cpu where the process is running, so if you only have a uniprocessor machine it could easy get critical.
I have not yet tested dovecot in productive environment but i will do this soon, i will report the result if requested.
With the configuration of courier i had never any problem, so from that ni cant prove your experience.
Frank
Marshal Newrock wrote:
On Fri, 09 Mar 2007 08:34:36 +0800 Erdenebat Gantomor rklogin@gmail.com wrote:
I'm the beginner for IMAP/POP3 servers. I'm starting to use Dovecot. But I'm confusing between Courier-IMAP and Dovecot. Anyone tell me some quick tips regarding this issue. What's the better and what's the worst thing comparing these two IMAP/POP3 servers? I think the Dovecot is good enough for security and performance issue over Courier. Is it right? And how about the feature comparision?
A while back, I was trying to configure Courier to use a MySQL database. It wasn't working, and I couldn't figure out why. After a bit of head-scratching, I decided to try the new thing that everyone was talking about, Dovecot (which was then at version 0.99). It still didn't work, but it told me why, and within an hour, it was working. :)
As an added benefit, with postfix 2.3 or later (or a patched postfix 2.2), it replaces Cyrus SASL for SMTP authentication, and is vastly simpler to configure.
I don't think the Courier configuration is terribly complicated, but I also don't recall it having quite so many features as Dovecot. Which is certainly not to say that Dovecot configuration is in any way complicated.
Erdenebat Gantomor wrote:
I'm the beginner for IMAP/POP3 servers. I'm starting to use Dovecot. But I'm confusing between Courier-IMAP and Dovecot. Anyone tell me some quick tips regarding this issue. What's the better and what's the worst thing comparing these two IMAP/POP3 servers? I think the Dovecot is good enough for security and performance issue over Courier. Is it right? And how about the feature comparision?
I chose Dovecot because I had mbox format files and although maildir is probably better I wasn't ready to make that level of change and wanted something that was compatible with both without starting a cult around the idea of which is better. I'm an Exim user and I like stuff that just works and is compatible with just about everything I need to do. The config files are easy to follow and versitile.
participants (9)
-
Ben
-
Curtis Maloney
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Erdenebat Gantomor
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Ethan Sommer
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Frank Doege
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Marc Perkel
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Marshal Newrock
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Marten Lehmann
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Timo Sirainen