Cyrus Imap server Questions

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Sun, 2009-08-16 at 18:22 -0500, Nic Bernstein wrote:
> If you need to do archival, I recommend that instead of using Sendmail, 
> you look into using Postfix.  It has an option "always_bcc" which can be 
> used to send a copy of each message, internal as well as incoming and

Ditto; with the caveat this it only sort of works.  And if you ask how
to make it work completely the lovely folks on the Postfix list will
tell you that how to do so is just too obvious for them to bother
answering the question - although while I wasted my time subscribed to
that list I saw at least two other people ask the same question - and
get the same wonderfully helpful answer.

> outgoing, to a particular mailbox.  You can then either have that 
> mailbox put into a separate partition.

Yes, we archive all mail to a shared folder with restricted permissions.
This is pretty easy to setup.  Then cyr_expire messages out of that
folder at a certain age.  Only caveat [see above] is that you loose some
information from the message such as BCC:

This plus delayed expunge provides a nicely managed mailstore that also
makes the auditors reasonably happy.

> As far as you hardware choices, they seem reasonable.  I have systems 
> with hundreds of users working off of SATA arrays quite happily, though 
> for a modern system I would use SAS. 

Ditto, for ~50 users I doubt you'd have a problem unless they are
extreme users.

> > 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 ?

I wouldn't use RAID5, at least not for /var/lib/imap.  /var/lib/imap
[metadata] is more I/O intensive that /var/spool/imap [mail store].
Honestly, using RAID5 for /var/spool/imap probably wouldn't be a problem
with a good battery-backed RAID card and a few hundred users.

> > 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)

Look at the network traffic.  I doubt this is Cyrus' fault.

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

Sorry, I don't know anything about Outlook Auto Archive.

> > 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!)

I'd stick with Outlook over TB.

> > Is there a way to Archive Older Messages on the server ?

Why are you archiving?  If your MTA is archiving [for auditor/lawyer
happiness] do you need the IMAP server to archive?

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

I run Cyrus on CentOS5.x for ~350 users.  They use a mix of clients but
not many Outlook users.

I have a doc that covers some Cyrus stuff -
<http://docs.opengroupware.org/Members/whitemice/wmogag/file_view>
 - in the Cyrus chapter.
-- 
OpenGroupware developer: awilliam at whitemice.org
<http://whitemiceconsulting.blogspot.com/>
OpenGroupare & Cyrus IMAPd documenation @
<http://docs.opengroupware.org/Members/whitemice/wmogag/file_view>