Cyrus Imap server Questions

[John Duthie]

I am currently proving a Cyrus Imap / E-Groupware server will work at
my company.
(replacing FT gate, Competing against Exchange).

We are almost at the stage where we will be getting hardware.

I need advice on some points.

Hardware.
archival.
ms outlook IMAP support Issues.

The Site:
~50 Users , all accessing email all day (heavy usage can be assumed).
IT Company/ Call center.

Hardware:

Single server
Dual Xeon 2 core , 8 GB ram
looking at a Intel SAS 256 MB RAID card
with 2 Arrays
300 GB SAS - OS / and email
and 1 TB SATA -  Archival

would using SATA for the /var/spool/imap folder limit performance much
vs using SAS drives ?

would raid5 using 3 or 4 1 TB drives be better than the sas raid 1 ?


My test server.  is a Dualcore E5200  @ 2.50GHz wwith 2GB ram and a
160 SATA drive.

I get delays accessing my email in Outlook (1.5 Gb of email) , I
suspect this delay is Outlook
Outlook is unresponsive for 2-3 minutes at startup (when syncing)

I also get a Message now and then  about my connection being closed

All of the users currently use Outlook.
Outlook Auto Archive does not seem to work with IMAP

I am 99% sure this is outlook is the problem, are there workarounds available ?
(fairly sure I can convert a lot of people to Thunderbird etc , But
the Managers like their Outlook!)


Is there a way to Archive Older Messages on the server ?
maybe ipurge not purging but moving emails ?

( we need to keep every email Archived for Legal reasons etc. )
(still don't know how to get Sendmail to archive all outgoing messages
yet either)

also:
The RHEL5.3  cyrus rc script  runs a database backup on shutdown and a
restore on bootup - This is a bit dumb, when the backup progess
crashed due to a misconfigeration (test server) and the server was
Power reset.  it the restored a broken backup and I lost the mailbox
database ..  - Not your fault but something to watch out for.


If anyone out there has set-up a similar system and hit a Stumbling
block Please let me know !!

also if anyone needs a pam config for imap to authenticate against a
egroupware mysql database I have it working.

TIA

John.