Mr Sam made a throwaway comment on one of the courier lists—I can’t remember where, or when—that Courier would be vindicated in a world of SSDs. I think he may be right.
Back when I first self-hosted email (about 2004-5 or so), I used to use sendmail+maildrop for my mail system, but chose Dovecot for my IMAP server because this was a time of HDDs and even with maildir indexing was still very useful, especially with big mailboxes and webmail. But that was a long time ago, and all my IMAP clients cache at least recent metadata, and I don’t use webmail any more (though my experience with sqwebmail is still that I'd choose to use it even now). I was also charmed by dovecot's relative simplicity of configuration compared to Courier with its more modular design, but I find that I now also need to implement Apple's push extensions for iOS, so that being able to wedge code between co-operating processes would actually be a benefit I couldn't get in Dovecot without patches. [1] So Courier-imapd would, after all, be a delightful choice for someone like me, on a home server, using maildirs for local access and with a willingness to put pieces together the way I want to get things done in an interoperable and efficient fashion, with minimal disk writes for logs or databases. I still love Dovecot a lot and would recommend it if you don’t know what kinds of clients you’ll be using, but my home server is now running from an SSD stripe (backed up hourly to a RAID6 HDD array though, yes, as it’s also a NAS), and I really don’t feel like the extra complexity of Dovecot is warranted—it’s now essentially Cyrus, for maildir fans, and overkill for what I need. The only feature I feel courier-imapd could use from other servers is CONDSTORE+QRESYNC, which is a massive gain for mobile clients—but perhaps I could live without it. I presume everyone here uses courier-imapd because they find it still works for them. Is it your experience that for typical caching desktop and mobile clients, imapd performs acceptably well? Is the lack of CONDSTORE+QRESYNC much of a problem in practice? If an on-line client only does a FETCH of flags to update its view, does it cost any more than an initial listing of the maildir directories (no stat()ing of every file)? Cheers, Sabahattin [1] The patch is available here: https://github.com/drandreas/courier-apns It's not ideal for adding to a system with vendor-supplied binaries though, so I'll re-implement it as a filter, unless Debian somehow decides to patch it in. It's proprietary. _______________________________________________ Courier-imap mailing list Courier-imap@lists.sourceforge.net Unsubscribe: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/courier-imap
