[Dovecot] considering dovecot

[Francisco Reyes]

Rick Hazey writes:

> I'm making a case to use Dovecot over Courier and would like some  
> feedback. I've searched the web extensively and have been unable to  
> find any hard information regarding Dovecot's IMAP performance. I've  
> got some pressure to use Courier but my gut tells me that Dovecot  
> should be much faster.

You don't have a test machine you can try it on?

> In particular, I will have typical users with  
> mailboxes exceeding 10,000 emails and in some cases up to 100,000.  
> Courier might be the "safe" choice but I'm not confident it can  
> handle inboxes with that many messages.

Courier will be near useless on a heavy usage machine with mailboxes with 
5,000+ emails. It highly depends on how busy the machine is, but courier 
does not handle large amount of mails well.

> Dovecot, with its indexes,  
> should be much, much faster. Can anyone point me to some benchmarks  
> or production uses of dovecot that bear this out?

I am working on testing and preparing a Courier to Dovecot move.
As a test I put 15,000 emails in two mailboxes.. one in a Courier machine 
and one on a (much smaller machine) with Dovecot. For that test I was using 
a webmail program to connect to both. Dovecot took under a minute the first 
time (when it created the idexes).. and was near instantaneous thereafter 
(as long as no new mail came in). Courier just timed out the webmail 
client.. after several minutes of waiting.
   
>  From my research, Courier maildrop appears to be what I need for  
> local delivery.

I recommend you consider Dovecot's LDA "deliver".

> Is it possible to use Maildrop for local delivery  
> with Dovecot?

Yes, it is possible.

> I also need the capability for users to set their own vacation  
> messages via a web page. Maildrop looks to handle this easily (by  
> allowing me to link the maildrop filter to a file with the vacation  
> message)

Not sure how to do it with deliver, but I believe it is possible, but I 
have not looked at that yet.

Is this a new install or something you are migrating?