cyrus and maildir/nfs

[Marten Lehmann]

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 
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 
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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