competition

[Simon Matter]

> On 9/20/2010 8:59 AM, Marc Patermann wrote:
>> And still, if someone asks a mailing list (not here certainly) how to
>> start with IMAPd, many people shout, to go with dovecot and not using
>> Cyrus.
>
> Hi -
>
> A little late to this thread, but here are a couple of modest
> observations:
>
> 1.
> I have cyrus and dovecot installations (with postfix smtp).  dovecot
> doesn't support an lmtp transport, which I finally decided was a deal
> killer.  In our (~1000 user) dovecot system, we're using procmail to
> ferry messages from the smtp server to dovecot deliver.  One very
> disturbing recent finding is that with some regularity messages are not
> being delivered with no notification to the sender -- they just get
> dropped. We think it's an ldap authentication problem, but it doesn't
> really matter what the cause is:  mail should either be delivered or
> someone should find out that it wasn't withough having to snoop around
> in log files.   Procmail is *supposed* to send this stuff back up the
> pipe when something goes wrong, but it's not happening.  Using lmtp is
> clean and simple and affords the administrator a huge amount of
> flexibility when using postfix:
>
>   mailbox_transport = lmtp:unix:/var/run/cyrus/socket/lmtp
>
> This doesn't work with dovecot; you have to use the mailbox_command.

I think dovecot now has LMTP support in the latest (dev?) version.

> That said, after spending the summer on the cyrus-devel list, I have a
> lot of confidence in the work that particularly Bron Gondwana has been
> doing and think that with -- with an infusion of some clear
> documentation, a project I'm more than happy to contribute to -- cyrus
> can probably become the default open source imap server.

Documentation is one thing, and dependencies like BDB another. But there
is something else I guess, for servers which are not dedicated mail
server, it would be really nice if one could install Cyrus and it just
works for every user having an account on the system. That can be done
with the autocreate patches but they are also not included in Cyrus. In
fact, Cyrus could have two main modes, one for dedicated, sealed mail
servers and one for "allround" servers with user accounts.

Simon