cyrus and maildir/nfs

[Simon Matter]

> Hello,
>
> I've been searching a lot concerning this issue, but most postings are
> too old, so I guess much has changed in between. I've got the following
> problem:
>
> We have to manage several thousands of mailboxes. Currently, the mails

The number of mailboxes doesn't matter too much. The question is how big
is your mailstorage growing.

> are stored in the maildir-format, the mailserver is running qmail. As
> the amount of mailboxes grows fast, only one server for all mails won't
> be sufficient in the near future. What I have in mind is to set up a big
> storage, which is accessible by all servers through nfs. This way,
> storage can be expanded in the background. Several mailservers shall
> receive mails through smtp (we will use exim on our next generation of
> mailservers) and the users will get their mails through POP3 and IMAP.
> Delivery through exim is no problem. We also have expirience with the
> pop3-daemon of qmail. Now we need an IMAP-server. For our purposes, I'm
> only aware of courier-imap, cyrus-imap and a third one, that I'm unable
> to find at this moment, but it was as slim as the qmail pop3d. However:
> courier-imap seems to be too complicated (altough first tests were
> successful), I lost the url of third imapd, so it's too small and
> approximately bad supported, that I don't want to use it in production,
> even if I'll ever find it again so only cyrus imap is left.
>
> If nfs and maildirs are still scaring you, then please explain, how you

In my experience, there is no way around Cyrus when you need a scalable
and high performant IMAP server. Search the archive logs for more info on
the Cyrus scalabilty.
If you go the Cyrus way, then forget maildir and nfs. Cyrus uses it's own
mailstore and you don't want something else.

Simon

> would prefer to scale everything. I don't want to do scaling on a
> limited mailbox per server-basis, that's too complicated. It's easier to
> expand the nfs-storage, put in a new mailserver and add it's ip-address
> to the dns-zone of the mailserver-name, that's used for all mx-records
> of our domains.
>
> I heard of the German isp "Schlund&Partner" to be using the combination
> exim and cyrus-imap. Does anyone know details on that?
>
> Regards
> Marten
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