Just need a push

[John P. Speno]

Hi, my name is John, and I'm a former unix sys admin but I gave it up  
to be a programmer (yay python!). Now I'm back in the sys admin game  
for a small family business that needs to scale its order management  
system better and I think cyrus and IMAP is just the thing, but I  
just wanted to get a little feedback.

All orders a now tracked in an Apple Mail.app POP account so there's  
thousands of locally stored folders containing mail messages on one  
machine (backed up nightly of course).

I need to share that among several machines now so many people can  
process the inbox and arrange the folders as needed. That's basically  
IMAP, right?

Beyond that, my concerns are performance and backups. Since the IMAP  
server will be out on the net, I assume Mail.app's local caching will  
make searching the mail as fast as it is now. Any clue?

But what about backups? Supposing I lost the server and it's mail.  
Would I be able to reconstruct it from the locally cached copy in  
Mail.app?

Thanks!