[olug] Archiving email.

[Jeff Hinrichs - DM&T]

On 2/13/07, Phil Brutsche <phil at brutsche.us> wrote:
> Sean Kelly wrote:
> > What are you using? Dovecot, Courier, UW? I tried using Dovecot, but
> > it was painfully slow. I have 6.1GB of mail, and the initial sync was
> > painful and some MUAs also cried when they had to open each mailbox
> > as well.
> >
> > Also, using Maildir, mbox, or proprietary as the backend? I've tried
> > both mbox and Maildir. While I see the advantages of Maildir, it
> > feels like a serious waste of inodes and has higher overhead due to
> > all the open()/close() shuffling.
>
> "Proprietary" backend - I'm using Cyrus IMAP, authenticated via LDAP
> with Exim delivering messages via LMTP.
+1 Cyrus
+1 Exim

light, fast and delicious.

> My experience is that Maildirs served via IMAP suck when you have more
> than a couple hundred messages in a folder, and mboxes have this problem
> with multiple login sessions. Neither are a problem with Cyrus.
>
> Indexed maildirs with Dovecot have the potential to not suck, but
> Dovecot still has a lot of maturing to do, when compared to Cyrus.
>
> IME there are 2 drawbacks to Cyrus:
>  a) It uses SASL for authentication. Black magic and flying rubber
> chickens abound!
Yes sasl is voodoo but once you get the right incantations it's not
bad -- not great but an easy trade off for cyrus.

>  b) The *only* ways to access your messages are IMAP and POP3
>
That's why I was asking if he wasn't happy with his current config.
It sounded like he just wanted some peace of mind.  And using maildirs
with exim makes grep a real nice search tool.  Or you could keep a
copy local an let a search utility do the heavy lifting.  Messages as
files is worth every trade off in my opinion.

I haven't worked extremely large set ups (like a university) but it
worked great with my power/packrat/my mail is my storage folder types.
 Cyrus and exim could handle more messages in a folder than outlook
can handle.  Outlook 2000 used to choke when you ran over 32K messages
in a folder and I had users who ran over that limit.  Don't even get
me started and restoring "lost"/deleted messages -- hands down maildir
is the way to go.

If it weren't for calendaring, management would never have spent the
money to go over to the dark side.

--jeff