competition

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Tue, 2010-09-21 at 11:44 +0200, Marc Patermann wrote:
> Hi,
> André Schild schrieb am 21.09.2010 10:40 Uhr:
> > Am 21.09.2010 09:31, schrieb Pascal Gienger:
> >> I begin to be tired from this "dovecot is much more besser, you 
> >> HAVE TO USE IT", why don't you migrate, ... ...?
> Yes, I'm too. But this is what you see in forums and mailing list. And
> my post is intended to see what the Cyrus community can do to /explain/ 
> the product any better.

"Be there" is the only thing I can think of.  The only way to counter
advocates is to be one.

> > 2. Newbies, which do not know cyrus, they just ask for advice and a 
> > simple starter experience with the imap server. In the last month 
> > there has been much posts of type "Dovecot is the 
> > greates/simples/best/etc. " So the new users are very likely to go to
> >  dovecot instead of cyrus, because of "advices" from other internet 
> > users.
> This is my experience, too.

Yep.  Also, for some reason, many people have the opinion that Cyrus is
'arcane' in some way.  I honestly have no idea where that comes from
except perhaps from the dreadful state of the documentation.  But over
the years I've been able to fairly easily figure out what I need to
know.

> > One important thing is the documentation of the imap server, and 
> > there cyrus could offer more.... (Just my opinion)
> The new web site is a good start.
> We should start a best practice section in the wiki.
> - How do I install Cyrus on Debian/Ubuntu/...?

Ugh, please no.  Distro specific directions are lame, pointless, and
unmaintainable [beyond possibly packages-are-here].  Once the packages
are installed setting up is essentially the same everywhere.

> - From single server to multi server?
> - How to start with partitions and why?
> - Where to get latest releases (rpm/deb) when is not in my
>    distriburtion (simon matter etc.)?
> - Everyone is talking about "Push-Mail" - how to do it with Cyrus?

It just happens if you your client supports IMAP idle.  K9 on the
Android seems to work very well with Cyrus in the 'push' mode.  Although
I've noticed users usually turn it off within a couple of weeks -
really, nobody wants push-mail once they have it.

> - What if I want "Groupware" later, can I still use Cyrus?
>    (link to projects supporting Cyrus, OX etc)

Shameless self promotion -I have a chapter on Cyrus in WMOGAG
(OpenGroupware Administrator's Guide)
<http://docs.opengroupware.org/Members/whitemice/wmogag/file_view>
I've gotten quite a few compliments on it.

> - I want to have virtual users in LDAP/RDBMS - how to do it?
> There may be much more basic task which may be well know to us but would 
> be interesting to newbies to know.
> IMHO the "What is Cyrus?" page should be worked over. Why do we not talk 
> about who is using Cyrus IMAPd and how - "Success Stories" (fastmail.fm?)?

-- 
Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam at whitemice.org> LPIC-1, Novell CLA
<http://www.whitemiceconsulting.com>
OpenGroupware, Cyrus IMAPd, Postfix, OpenLDAP, Samba