[ILUG] IMAP: UW or Cyrus?

[Paul Jakma]

On Mon, 5 Sep 2005, Colm Buckley wrote:

> Don't use UW IMAP.

> If you just want to set up IMAP accounts for people, try Dovecot IMAP server.

FWIW, I'd suggest using UW IMAP over dovecot.

I tried moving to dovecot, given that UW IMAP is no longer supported 
or supplied with Fedora (which my mail server runs), but:

- it doesn't support as much in the way of secure login mechanisms,
   in particular it doesn't support GSS-API (which I like to use)

   (I can't remember if it supports SASL, but if it doesn't then the
    only secure mechs Dovecot supports is plain-over-TLS or TLS certs,
    one of which I find problematic, as clients sometimes silently
    fall back to non-TLS if TLS fails - boom there goes your
    password, and the latter is completely icky and unacceptable to me)

- Dovecot doesn't support as many IMAP search criteria (iirc), makes
   searching through mail noticeably slower (iirc)

- Dovecot is noticeably, nay *infuriatingly*, slow compared to
   UW-IMAP, particularly on large mailboxes.

   (this is despite dovecot maintaining reusable indices on-disk, yet
    still manages to be slower than UW-IMAP, which does not keep them
    on disk.)

The latter was the tipping point and made me go back to UW-IMAP, 
*despite* the extra bother of having to track UW-IMAP releases myself 
and make FC RPMs, over dovecot which is maintained in FC.

regards,
-- 
Paul Jakma	paul at clubi.ie	paul at jakma.org	Key ID: 64A2FF6A
Fortune:
What makes the universe so hard to comprehend is that there's nothing
to compare it with.