One good reason to prefer Dovecot over Cyrus is that it supports both Maildir and Mailbox, meaning you don't have to change your mailbox format from that of UW-IMAP (unless you're using MBX), and can gradually switch over to Maildir. It's made a huge difference to our IMAP server performance, whilst keeping backwards compatablility with UW.

Cyrus has been around longer, and has many more users, so it's a more mature product, but it is a bit of a fiddle to set up, and uses a proprietary mailbox format (something like Maildir) and isn't coded as neatly as Dovecot :)

Best Wishes, Chris

Florian Schnabel wrote:

Hi,

i never used dovecot so far, but i heard a couple good things about it .. for one the debian maintainer of the exim package recommended it :-)

so i want to change our mailserver (currently using ipop3 and uw-imap) to dovecot ... now my boss seems to favour cyrus.

i could use some good arguments for dovecot, also your experiences with it and with other mailservers so i can make a reasonable desicion and preset some good arguments :-)

Florian

-- --+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+- Christopher Wakelin, c.d.wakelin@reading.ac.uk IT Services Centre, The University of Reading, Tel: +44 (0)118 378 8439 Whiteknights, Reading, RG6 2AF, UK Fax: +44 (0)118 975 3094

Florian Schnabel wrote:

Hi,

so i want to change our mailserver (currently using ipop3 and uw-imap) to dovecot ... now my boss seems to favour cyrus.

Anecdotal evidence on this list suggests Dovecot will significantly reduce your server load compared with uw-imap. I couldn't say, Dovecot is the only IMAP server I've put into production.

And the main reason for that was it was so _simple_ to get it up and running... and running... and running...

Which I consider two great plusses - it's simple to set up, and it just keeps running.

Oh, and I got POP3 in the mix, free!

-- Curtis Maloney cmaloney@cardgate.net