Replacing WINDOWS and NOVELL service with CYRUS

[Efler, Lukas]

hi David

>Our questions therefore are as follows:
>
>a. How does CYRUS collect our incoming email from our Internet Service Provider (ISP)? (POP3?)
It doesn't. That would be the job of a mail transport agent (mta). Cyrus imap is a mail delivery agent (mda). It feeds into the mailbox what it gets fed into itself. It does not fetch, retrieve or connect to your ISP or to the Internet at all.

>b. How does CYRUS send email via our ISP to the outside world? (SMTP?)
Again, it doesn't. Sending mail via smtp again is the job of an mta. Common in the open source world are sendmail, postfix, exim, qmail, courier and others.

>c. Can we use email addresses that include "." such as david.west at osmis.com, d.f.west at osmis.com?
Yes, but only if you turn on the unix hierarchy separator option in the imapd config file. A better approach (imho) would be to have your mta or system aliases to convert any "user.name" addresses to "username"

>d. Does CYRUS store the messages in individual mailboxes for each "client"?
Cyrus stores messages in individual mailboxes for each USER. Clients (ie. user computers) have no relevance.

>e. Can we use Outlook Express and/or Outlook 2000 as a client to CYRUS?
Yes. Any client program that speaks IMAP should basically work.

>f. If I normally use an office on the 4th floor but temporarily uses an office on the 1st floor will I be able to access my messages?
Unfortunately, no. Cyrus works horizontally only. The 3rd plane of dimension will only be added in version 3. But you could install your server in your elevator and do a round-robin. 5 minute stops at one story at a time should be enough for all clients on that level to fetch their mail. 


>h. What are the licensing issues regarding CYRUS under the following circumstance:
here: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/imapd/license.html

>i. What are the ongoing support cost for CYRUS under the following circumstances:
That really is up to you. Cyrus is an open source project and there's no commercial support contract or help available from the makers (see the license). Some amount of help is available in the form of this mailing list and other places in the web. You said you were the least technically competent person at your place. You should see if the technical people you have are up to the job of installing and maintaining a unix/linux system in general and a cyrus imap server specifically. I can tell you that administring a larger system (more than a dozen users) usually requires a large amount of knowledge and experience in unix systems administration and mail systems/networking. If you have no such person, I would recommend hiring or contracting someone who can do that for you. The resulting costs would be your ongoing support costs.

Hope this gives you some insights

Lukas