Replacing WINDOWS and NOVELL service with CYRUS

[Eric Ewanco]

David West wrote:

I am another user unaffiliated with the Cyrus developers who can 
nonetheless answer some of your questions.

> a. How does CYRUS collect our incoming email from our Internet Service 
> Provider (ISP)? (POP3?)

As others have pointed out, Cyrus relies on other components (the Mail 
Transfer Agent) to deliver mail to it.  Typically people run their own 
MTA (such as Sendmail), which accepts mail from the Internet and can be 
configured to deliver it directly to Cyrus.  In this setup the system 
runs as what is called a Mail Exchanger (MX).  If you don't want to or 
cannot act as your own MX, presumably your ISP will, and you'd have to 
find out how to transfer mail from your ISP (i.e. your ISP's MX) to 
Cyrus.  There are several ways of doing it; if POP3 is your only choice, 
you could have a program (fetchmail maybe?) run periodically and 
download messages and deliver them to Cyrus.  You could have their 
system configured to run as a relay, and run Sendmail on your system; 
you wouldn't act exactly as an MX but you'd act as an MTA.  Or maybe 
their Sendmail could be configured to connect directly to Cyrus and 
deliver mail that way (via LMTP).

> b. How does CYRUS send email via our ISP to the outside world? (SMTP?)

Cyrus (for the most part) does not send mail; your Mail User Agents 
(MUAs, the programs run on the clients) send mail.  That part likely 
would not change from the way it is now.

> 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?

The IMAP protocol, which Cyrus employs, allows you to access your 
mailbox from any location you can access your server.  For example, I 
run Cyrus on my home machine, and can access my mail using the email 
client on my Cyrus machine, the email client on my wireless notebook, or 
the email client on my machine at work, which connects over the Internet 
to my Cyrus IMAP server.  I see the same view in each location, and 
messages that I move or delete in one place are reflected in the other 
places.  So if you normally read your mail on a machine on the 4th 
floor, and then go down to the 1st floor, you'd be able to access all 
your messages from there as well.

Hope this helps.

Eric Ewanco