Re: [gentoo-user] IMAP servers

["Joost Roeleveld" <Joost.Roeleveld@ntlworld.com>]

> This is not so much a problem as an 'I wonder'...
>
> I currently use dovecot imap with maildir to support several dozen
> folders containing several gigabytes of mail using Thunderbird as a mail
> client.  This "works" - but I am surprised by the number of imap
> processes that the mail server is running to support a single
> Thunderbird client... it appears that there is one connection per folder
> and one process per connection... which seems (to me at least) to be
> overkill.

Having never used dovecot, I can't comment on this. But maybe this can be
changed in a configuration file somewhere?
But I think this is caused by the client, not by the server.

> I'm aware that there are lots of IMAP clients I might have chosen -
> Courier; UWImap, Cyrus and dovecot... but I'm finding it difficult to
> establish details which would help me choose the most appropriate server
> for my purposes.  In order of importance, I'm interested in:
>
>     1.   Stability and reliability.
>     2.   Scalability to handle a very large number of 'folders' for a
> relatively small number of end-users.
>     3.   Performance (primarily with respect to 'new mail'
> notifications, but also, to a lesser extent, with searching archived
> messages.
>
> I'd be interested to hear any anecdotes from Gentooists who have
> addressed a similar question recently...
>
> Steve

I have a similar requirement for my emails, esp. with the mailinglists I
can end up with some very large folders (100,000+ messages in one of my
folders)

I found that Courier-IMAP didn't manage to handle these folders very well,
and I had to split these folders up into seperate folders for this to
work.
I have since moved to Cyrus and I find that this works easier, even with
only 2 users using it, it currently handles over 7Gb of stored email.

Only once had a problem with one of the folders, which was easily fixed.
The cause for this was most likely a minor corruption on the filesystem
when my server lost power. (UPS is unreliable, but that's a different
issue)

As for the performance with regards to notifications, I find that the
mailclient is responsible for this, rather then the server. Doing a quick
check for new emails is very quick with Cyrus, Courier didn't scale very
well in my experience.

I hope this helps, and that others can come with more information,
including some benchmarks, if these exist.

As a final note, I don't think either Courier or Cyrus have ever lost a
single email, but I have never done a full check for this.

--
Joost Roeleveld

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