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I have a client I've been trying to talk into switching from courier to dovecot, but the owner of the company wants me to set up two different accounts in Thunderbird (I finally got him switched to that from outlook express), one accessing his account through courier, and one through dovecot, so he can compare the speed...

Is this even possible? I've never tried it before, so before I spend a lot of time, I want to know if I'd be wasting it (my time)...

Yes, it's possible. You just have to set the 2 servers up on separate ports and make sure the correct ports are set in Thunderbird. I'm not sure what would happen with dovecot's index files but most likely if courier does something goofy they will just get rebuilt.

Have you actually done it?

I have Dovecot set up on port 10993, but before I actually fire it up, I want to make sure it isn't going to hose anything. I will backup the maildirs in question before I do bring dovecot up, of course, but still wouldn't want to do anything that might mess anything up.

The index files are my main concern.

I guess the safest thing to do is to tell postfix to queue his mail so nothing gets delivered while he's messing around, then let him play - see how fast folders load, etc (he's got some pretty big ones, 30,000 messages or more)...

Thanks - I'll wait and see if anyone else chimes in - I like to get more than one opinion, and to hear from at least one person who has actually done what I'm about to do, when trying something like this (that I've never done before)...

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Best regards,

Charles

Hello Charles,

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The index files are my main concern.

Well, that and having two different servers reading from potentially the same files/maildirs at the same time. Honestly, I just don't know enough about IMAP to know if there is anything to worry about or not... As far as I know, Maildir is implicitly locking safe and Dovecot handles it's index files very robust. If Postfix delivers a mail without using Dovecots deliver program, Dovecot also has to update its index files, so it shouldn't be a problem if Courier moves some mail around. Also it would only be a fair test if your tester is testing the servers one after the other and not simultaneously - you should tell him. So I don't

Charles Marcus wrote: think anything will get messed up, but you nevertheless don't want this type of setup for anything else than testing ;)

Regards, Philipp

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The index files are my main concern.

Courier will ignore them. So they may be out of sync if you move a lot of messages around with Courier, but Dovecot will update them.

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I guess the safest thing to do is to tell postfix to queue his mail so nothing gets delivered while he's messing around, then let him play - see how fast folders load, etc (he's got some pretty big ones, 30,000 messages or more)...

The safest thing to do, of course, is to back up.

Of course - which is why I said that would be the first thing I did... ;)

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Thanks - I'll wait and see if anyone else chimes in - I like to get more than one opinion, and to hear from at least one person who has actually done what I'm about to do, when trying something like this (that I've never done before)...

I've done similar, my mailstore is on nfs, and had completely different servers both accessing it. And yes, Dovecot was much much faster.

Good to know - thanks for the contrib... :)

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Best regards,

Charles

Gunter Ohrner wrote:

Am Sonntag, 29. April 2007 schrieb Charles Marcus:

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outlook express), one accessing his account through courier, and one through dovecot, so he can compare the speed...

Doing a whole batch of operations with each server before trying the same with the other server for comparison purposes will probably reflect reality much closer.

I posted some ad hoc numbers to the list back in February, one machine Courier and the other Dovecot using Squirrelmail as the frontend.

http://dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2007-February/019560.html

Now that the server ("Server B") is in production with 1.0.0, the users are seeing fantastic speed gains. Even just emptying the trash feels a whole lot snappier than ever...

-te

-- Troy Engel | Systems Engineer Fluid, Inc | http://www.fluid.com

You should tell your client that continuously switching between accunts to perform some operation and thus compare it will slow down Dovecot a lot, as it needs to update its indexes which are osboleted by Courier all the time.

Doing a whole batch of operations with each server before trying the same with the other server for comparison purposes will probably reflect reality much closer.

But of course...

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Best regards,

Charles