Flame War! -- IMAP Servers

[Craig White]

On Thu, 2006-07-13 at 09:17 -0700, Nathan England wrote:
> All,
> 
> I have roughly 250 users and we would like the ability to keep email on the 
> server. We don't have any specials needs and there aren't enough meetings to 
> herald a calendaring effort, so basically only email storage. Currently I am 
> using Fedora Core 5 with Dovecot for IMAP. Some users access through 
> squirrelmail and others use Outlook Express. I am switching the OE users over 
> to thunderbird (and the Office users over to OO.o - another story) and most 
> users are utilizing FireFox.
> 
> The only real consideration is thousands of emails. Dovecot should be able to 
> handle this no sweat, but with only a few users testing the system it choked.
> The machine for the time being is not state-of-the-art by any means, but has a 
> 2.4GHZ p4 with HT turned off and 1 GB of ram. Our network is only 10/100 and 
> we are not looking into upgrading the switches to 1GB any time soon.
> 
> I don't mean to start a flame war, I am truly interested in your experiences 
> as the wealth of knowledge in this group is quite scary at times~!
> 
> I appreciate all questions, helpful ideas and bricks thrown my way!
> 
> nathan
> 
> P.S. As this information might help others I would like to keep it on list, 
> but if any of you happen to work for local gov't, please contact me off list 
> as I have further questions... storage/retrieval and auditing stuff for 
> gov't.
----
I switched over to cyrus-imapd a long time ago and never looked back.
Killer features include:
- duplicate suppression
- Autocreate folders
- Autocreate sieve (sieve works perfectly even with virtual users i.e.
no shell no home dir) - it's easy to set it up to have a newly created
user with a spam folder to automatically put higher SA scoring emails
and with Horde/IMP/Ingo, users can manage their own sieve scripts (white
lists, black lists, vacation replies, etc.). Perhaps squirrelmail has
utility for the user to manage sieve scripts.
- Autocreate subscriptions
- Public folders & shared email (sophisticated ACL system permits a
granular permission arrangement on mail boxes - especially public
mailboxes)
- Strong backend support including scheduled mailbox indexing for very
fast searches, expiring mail items
- Easily adaptable to any user/password schema (I am pretty much stuck
on LDAP)
- Built-in user quotas
- Faster than anything I have ever seen - each email is stored
separately, unlike mbox
- Advanced feature set (supports idled, multiple data stores, eminently
expandable)

Craig

ps...yes, it supports pop3 too