On Friday 09 February 2007, Per-Olov Sjöholm wrote:
Cyrus uses a sealed mail store that uses maildir+ and indexed mailspools. This gives a huge performance boost. Cyrus also makes procmail not needed as it supports sieve server side sorting directly. Procmails receive, analyze and then maybe reject is not a preferred solution. Courier is a good server, but Cyrus is way ahead of Courier with a better architecture and features (MY opinion). But one benefit I can come up with is that Courier seems to work seamless and perfect over NFS which is not the case with Cyrus.
I agree with this assessment. However, I think Cyrus with mysql can be run on nfs. Cyrus is a one stop shopping center for MDAs. It offeres both secure imap and insecure imap as well as secure pop3 and insecure pop3. You don't need any procmail, pop3d, imapd etc because these services are all managed by cyrus. You can both pop and imap the same account (don't do it, its dumb, but possible, which means your users can switch from one to the other at will). It supports just about every imap client I've run into, including my cell phone, outlook, outlook-distress, pegasus, eudora, kmail, mozilla mail etc. etc. If you want it for business use, buy SLED and be done with it because SLED does a very good job of setting up and integrating postfix, amavisd, (for spamassassin, antivirus), and cyrus and ldap and will save you tons of time. If you want to learn something, those same things install reasonably easy with opensuse 10.2. Cyrus can be a bit of a pain to setup, but take it slow and rtfm and its pretty cool. The certificate that you need for secure imap will generate warnings on some clients the first time (because its usually self signed unless you want to shell out for a certificate for your home mail server), but once the certificate is manually accepted by the client (just about any client) it works very well. Problem areas include setting the permissions of mail subdirectories you create with your imap client. Most clients can create and use these folders with no problem, but if you want to use sieve to put mail there you have to set permissions, and Kmail is the only one I know of that offers this. Users can do it at the shell, but don't try to teach that to your grandmother. The initial allocations suggested by SuSE's cyrus setup are inadequate for most users, so jack those way up. Configuration is handled fairly well with yast, but you will want to do some fine tuning and config file surfing. By the time you go the trouble to set up secure imap, you might as well set up secure postfix and be able to send/receive from anywhere. I can even use my Cell phone to read mail and reply when on the road. You can fight it, or just take the easy way out using two copies of your certificate, one for secure smtp and the other for secure imap. They usually end up running from different directories. I've also heard good things about Dovecot, but know virtually nothing about it. -- _____________________________________ John Andersen