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

Tom Allison tallison@tacocat.net wrote: [...]

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/...) [...]

I am an exim-guy. ;-) But afaik this all is possible with sendmail, too, amavisd-new connects to sendmail's milter interface. /This/ is no reason to switch MTAs. cu andreas

On Wednesday 31 December 1969 04:00 pm, you wrote:

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.

here I dont have 60 employies but I do generate about 1200 emials a day. I use Postfix with maildrop wich is much easier to use than procmail and at least if not more powerful. I have maildrop do local delivery and then use dovecot in secure mode with imap to get the emails. Even with imap dovecot is blindingly fast. Folders with around 10000 emails refresh in under a minute with about 600 or so at a time that are new.

The nice thing about this is that with maildrop I can easily filter spam whit spamassassin. At about 600 spam emails a day it misses about 1% I have only had about 2 or 3 false positives for about 30000 or 40000 spam emails. Thats a very good ratio.

I also filter virii with anomy saitizer. It works very simply and never needs any definition update files. You can set the config file to simply not allow certain kinds of atachments. It is 100% secure 100% of the time. It can easily be set to allow some kinds of atachments like zip or whatever. This is not so bad as any user that knows enough to unzip a file is a little more advanced and hopefully knows a little bit more about their system. Anomy also defangs bad html in some emails to protect from that kind of atack.

I then have maildrop filter the spam out and virii out into thier own folders on the imap server. The files can still be accessed but for hte most part you dont need to.

The reason i use imap is so that i can check the virii and spam and see if it is all legit.

Pop would be very easy to set up and run on this also allowing the user to easily download anything that is not spam or virii which the admin could later check out and either transfer for the user and simply delete.

If it is needed maildrop could also be setup to make spamassassin autolearn new spam or ham.

-- New and improved with advanced outlook crash handler.

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