Hi All,
searching my of-line fedora list archive (535271 mails) around did not give me any information on the performance difference between using dovecot and using cyrus.
Right now, I've installed and configured postfix and cyrus-imapd to handle only 2 email accounts. (testing)
I recently had a chat with a friend and he was telling me dovecot is turning out to be not only simpler in configuration but was also faster(?) than cyrus-imapd.
To Run a imap server serving say a big corporation, heck even a _big_ ISP, which would have been better? Cyrus or dovecot? Has anyone any experience with running both and testing/playing with either?
Some people say Cyrus is complicated to manage, but I disagree. To use Cyrus on Fedora, simply install Cyrus packages, change two lines in sendmail.mc, and off you go. It simply works. You don't need to touch anything.
The only administration overhead compared to wu-imapd or dovecot, you have to manually create user's mailbox (using cyradm). Now, how complicated is to type "cm user.foobar"? I wouldn't call that something complicated. If you are to lazy to type "cm user.foobar", you can just as well use autocreateinboxfolders and autosubscribeinboxfolders options in imapd.conf, and have Cyrus do the job for you, mailboxes will be created automatically as soon as user logs in. Can it be any simpler? Probably not. (as a side note, my advice is not to use createonpost in combination with auto*inboxfolders options, or you'll get mailbox created for every mistyped email address).
If you don't want users to have shell accounts just change setting for saslauthd in /etc/sysconfig/saslauthd to use something other than shadow file for authentication (pam/ldap/kerberos5/whatever). Simple as that.
For large coprporation / big ISP, Cyrus is probably easier to implement and manage. In those kinds of places, you don't want users to have accounts on the mail server (Cyrus is designed not to require local user accounts from day one). You also need a way to enable users to setup forwarding, vacation messages, and maybe even server-side mail filtering without using home directories with .forward and/or .procmail files on local file system. All of those come out of the box and working with Cyrus IMAPD. All you need to do is setup some kind of Web interface for users to use (such as for example smartsieve or websieve -- it would be nice if one of those two was packaged with Fedora). Installing smartsieve on Fedora is 10-15 minute job even for novice sysadmin (including time needed to use Google to find it on the web, and download it over not-so-fast link). If you can't do it in 15 minutes, step down from pedestal and stop calling yourself sysadmin ;-)
The only thing that is more complicated, IMHO, is if you already have users, and mail folders are in different format. Than you need to migrate it into the Cyrus. This can be time consuming if you have huge userbase (say 100,000 or more users). It requires a bit of planning, but is kind of straight forward. For some ideas (and ready-to-use conversion tools) check out:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/mimap/chapter/ch09.html#92594
Other than that, Cyrus IMAPD is only as complicated as you choose to make it complicated. If you intend to keep it simple, it will be simple. If you need to make complicated setup, it will allow you to do so. But than, it was you that complicated the things, not the Cyrus.
-- Aleksandar Milivojevic <amilivojevic@xxxxxx> Pollard Banknote Limited Systems Administrator 1499 Buffalo Place Tel: (204) 474-2323 ext 276 Winnipeg, MB R3T 1L7
