Why Cyrus?

[Patrick Goetz]

> Op 17-01-18 om 12:33 schreef Sebastian Hagedorn: >> Hi,
>>
>>> A new customer asks me to build a new mailserver environment with
>>> Dovecot. I normally use Cyrus.
>>>
>>> My question: What's better in Cyrus?
>>

This is terribly OCD, but I can't stand the maildir message formatting 
Dovecot uses.  Ugh, how inelegant.

6-8 years ago (when all the distros switched to Dovecot) cyrus wasn't 
being maintained very well. Since then the FastMail team has taken the 
reigns of development and is kicking ass.

That makes the choice kind of clear, in my mind.  AFAIK Dovecot is 
developed by just one person (or at the very least a small team) of 
volunteer developers.  If he/they get bored and move on to something 
else ...   Meanwhile, Cyrus now has commercial backing, which makes it a 
much more securely stable platform choice if you're just starting out 
and trying to decide which one to go with.

The biggest ongoing problem with Cyrus is the documentation, not that 
it's harder to install.  Cyrus is, if anything, easier to install than 
Dovecot (modulo distro packaging, which is the main difference here). 
The Dovecot guy writes very good documentation, and until recently 
trying to get information about how to set up Cyrus was like pulling 
teeth. I'm always having to appeal to this list whenever an issue comes 
up.  Recently I set up a vacation notification system.  Super easy AFTER 
A MONTH SPENT researching how to do it. I'm still not completely clear 
on how to set up multiple virtual mailhosts, either; my next onerous 
email research project.

FastMail of course has no incentive or reason to write documentation 
making it easier to set up your own Cyrus system(s); that's going to be 
up to the community.