[olug] Archiving email.

[Phil Brutsche]

Sean Kelly wrote:
> What are you using? Dovecot, Courier, UW? I tried using Dovecot, but
> it was painfully slow. I have 6.1GB of mail, and the initial sync was
> painful and some MUAs also cried when they had to open each mailbox
> as well.
> 
> Also, using Maildir, mbox, or proprietary as the backend? I've tried
> both mbox and Maildir. While I see the advantages of Maildir, it
> feels like a serious waste of inodes and has higher overhead due to
> all the open()/close() shuffling.

"Proprietary" backend - I'm using Cyrus IMAP, authenticated via LDAP
with Exim delivering messages via LMTP.

My experience is that Maildirs served via IMAP suck when you have more
than a couple hundred messages in a folder, and mboxes have this problem
with multiple login sessions. Neither are a problem with Cyrus.

Indexed maildirs with Dovecot have the potential to not suck, but
Dovecot still has a lot of maturing to do, when compared to Cyrus.

IME there are 2 drawbacks to Cyrus:
 a) It uses SASL for authentication. Black magic and flying rubber
chickens abound!
 b) The *only* ways to access your messages are IMAP and POP3

-- 

Phil Brutsche
phil at brutsche.us