[Dovecot] unofficial Survey about your Dovecot server :) to compare with my own server setup...

[Cor Bosman]

We use dovecot for 2 specific goals. First as a webmail backend, we
have 10 servers for that. We have a second group of servers for normal
imap access.

Servers: 20 dual 3.x ghz FreeBSD 4.10 
RAM: 4GB each
Number of Users: 40.000+ daily users, 150.000 regular users, 500.000+
	           uses it once in a while
Authentication: pam/radius
Mailboxes sizes: customers get a 500MB mail quota, we use multi
                   terrabyte netapp fileservers.
Dovecot version: 1.0 beta4 I think, we cant keep up :)
Email client software: anything you can imagine, and then some things you
                       cant imagine. 


We arent having a lot of problems. If we did, we'd be flooded with
helpdesk calls. Our main problem right now is that we use 2 namespaces
(one is historical) and one of those 2 uses mbox. Combined with
filesystem quotas that are necessary for us this produces some problems
when the quota is reached. Basically dovecot stops working at that
point. 

We're in the process of dropping support for that mbox namespace but
with so many customers thats not easy. So until that time we have to
help customers fix their quota on that FS if they fill it up. 

There also seems to be the occasional index corruption causing faulty
information to come from dovecot. For that reason we dont use indexes
on our webmail cluster unfortunately (well, we use memory indexes). The
IMAP service isnt fully in production yet so we can play around more
there, and occasionally customers still experience what are results of
index failures.  Maybe beta7 will fix it :)

Cor

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