Cyrus to replace UW?

[Jason Fesler]

> I have a Red Hat 9 mail server running UW imap and I find that mail retrieval
> from both Windows and Linux email clients is very slow, even to the extent
> that the email client sometimes times out waiting for the imap server to
> respond.

I regularly open 20,000+ message mailboxes with pine against cyrus.  This
generally takes <2 seconds to open for me.   "Normal" size mailboxes don't
take any perceivable time at all to open.  Your mileage may vary with
windows clients, as they typically want to download all the headers -
however, they won't be stalled on the server end scanning
/var/mail/lusername.

> I have heard that the Cyrus imap server is somewhat faster and was wondering
> if replacing the UW imap server with the Cyrus server would solve my problem.

It might.  The road there is long though.  If you are a do-it-yourselfer
who doesnt' mind getting dirty, reading *docs*, etc, you'll find that
cyrus is way way worth setting up from a performance and security point of
view.  I won't say setting up cyrus was easy for me though.  Persistance,
use of docs, use of the web search features of your favorite search
engine, etc all pay off big dividends.