[Dovecot] Planning a dovecot deployment: issues and questions

[Eric Rostetter]

Quoting Dan Price <dp at eng.sun.com>:

> I am currently evaluating Dovecot for deployment to ~200 software
> engineers (so, heavy email users); I'm hoping this list could provide
> wisdom about how best to do the configuration, evaluation and deployment,
> and what testing folks have done to determine whether dovecot is right for
> their site.  Below I've listed the diffs between the dovecot-example.conf
> and our config.

I would say it is a great IMAP/POP server for almost any site.
Best would be to wait for the release version of course, but most
(not all) of the RC releases are stable.

> Any thoughts about how to approach these issues?  I don't really have a
> feel for how to go from user-observed-app-doing-X to imapd-is-doing-Y.

Report them individually to the mailing list, and you will get instructions
on how to debug/repor them...

> The big challenge for our site may be mailbox size: the median
> mailbox size is 62M, the average is 176M and the largest is 1.1GB.
> I'd be curious to know what sort of mailbox sizes other sites have
> experienced, and how widespread the use of the Dovecot MDA is-- is this
> likely to make a big difference for us, and will we have to migrate our
> (approximately 25) procmail users to sieve?

We use mbox format and have no problems, though our largest mailboxe
is 600 MB, so I have no idea how this would work with a 1.1 GB mailbox.
I'd be sure you have lots of memory in the machine if you want to be
handling mailboxes that size.

We use sendmail for MTA, procmail for filters, dovecot for pop3/imap,
Horde/IMP for webmail, and have no problems.  You don't have to move
to maildir, or sieve, or anything else.  dovecot plays nice with almost
any software...

-- 
Eric Rostetter
The Department of Physics
The University of Texas at Austin

Go Longhorns!