On Friday 21 November 2003 02:33 pm, Eric Paynter wrote:
> Mark Knecht said:
> > Anyone have an opinion (on this board? no way!) ;-) about
> > whether
> > courier-imap or cyrus-imap would be a better choice for me?
>
> We use courier. In the past year, it's been fast and reliable with
> no significant issues. I don't have any experience with Cyrus.
>
I have been using cyrus-imap both at home and at work for about 2 years, and
have found it to be very fast and reliable. I have no personal experience
with courier, however; the documentation that I have read about it makes it
seem most desirable, however.
My main reason for selecting cyrus over courier is that cyrus is able to
receive mail via lmtp as well as smtp, using a local socket for lmtp. The
reason that is useful is that I retrieve mail from my outside maildrops using
fetchmail, and fetchmail can deliver the mail to cyrus via lmtp so I don't
need to run an smtp server at all. If you are already running smtp, that may
be a less important feature for you.
To correct a comment made by someone else, cyrus does _not_ use mbox format
for storing emails; it uses its own internal format based on BerkeleyDB. One
drawback to this is that I have not yet established a really good way of
exporting the emails from the database for archival purposes, and it would be
handle to do this with a more generally readable format like maildir or mbox
than just backing up the cyrus database itself. This is especially true
because the installations of cyrus on various distros often differ in smalls
but significant ways - for instance, my inittial cyrus installation was a
compile-your-own on debian, using Berkeley DB version 4. When I moved to
debian's official packages, that build was based on DB version 3, which meant
that I had to get all of the emails out of the database, install the debian
packages, then reimport the emails, which was a significant pain.
Cyrus is not all that easy to configure, the major problem being that cyrus's
authentication is based on sasl, and I have found the cyrus-sasl
documentation to be sparse at best. Each time I have done a cyrus install, I
have run into small but show-stopping glitches, usually with sasl, that have
cost me time until I could get things working - but once they are set up,
cyrus works extremely well. From what I have read, courier is easier to get
setup in the first place.
nl
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