[Dovecot] dovecot vs cyrus, uw, etc.

[Ian Marlier]

On 11/3/03 7:29 PM, "Tom Allison" <tallison at 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