Hi all. I'm making a case to use Dovecot over Courier and would like some feedback. I've searched the web extensively and have been unable to find any hard information regarding Dovecot's IMAP performance. I've got some pressure to use Courier but my gut tells me that Dovecot should be much faster. In particular, I will have typical users with mailboxes exceeding 10,000 emails and in some cases up to 100,000. Courier might be the "safe" choice but I'm not confident it can handle inboxes with that many messages. Dovecot, with its indexes, should be much, much faster. Can anyone point me to some benchmarks or production uses of dovecot that bear this out? From my research, Courier maildrop appears to be what I need for local delivery. Is it possible to use Maildrop for local delivery with Dovecot? Or is the Dovecot LDA needed to update the maildir indexes? I also need the capability for users to set their own vacation messages via a web page. Maildrop looks to handle this easily (by allowing me to link the maildrop filter to a file with the vacation message) but I don't see similar capability with the Sieve plugin. I do see where I can create a vacation message with Sieve but the text of the message seems to be required to reside within the Sieve script. Perhaps I'm missing something? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
On Tue, 2006-11-28 at 15:01 -0600, Rick Hazey wrote:> From my research, Courier maildrop appears to be what I need for > local delivery. Is it possible to use Maildrop for local delivery > with Dovecot?Yes, I use dovecot imap along with maildrop.> Or is the Dovecot LDA needed to update the maildir > indexes?There's just a slight performance increase if you use dovecot's lda, if you don't dovecot indexes the mails on the next access. Can't really help you with your other questions (well, vacation solves itself when you use maildrop, but the performance and all that) johannes -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 190 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part URL: <http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/attachments/20061128/4902a9da/attachment.bin>
Rick Hazey writes:> I'm making a case to use Dovecot over Courier and would like some > feedback. I've searched the web extensively and have been unable to > find any hard information regarding Dovecot's IMAP performance. I've > got some pressure to use Courier but my gut tells me that Dovecot > should be much faster.You don't have a test machine you can try it on?> In particular, I will have typical users with > mailboxes exceeding 10,000 emails and in some cases up to 100,000. > Courier might be the "safe" choice but I'm not confident it can > handle inboxes with that many messages.Courier will be near useless on a heavy usage machine with mailboxes with 5,000+ emails. It highly depends on how busy the machine is, but courier does not handle large amount of mails well.> Dovecot, with its indexes, > should be much, much faster. Can anyone point me to some benchmarks > or production uses of dovecot that bear this out?I am working on testing and preparing a Courier to Dovecot move. As a test I put 15,000 emails in two mailboxes.. one in a Courier machine and one on a (much smaller machine) with Dovecot. For that test I was using a webmail program to connect to both. Dovecot took under a minute the first time (when it created the idexes).. and was near instantaneous thereafter (as long as no new mail came in). Courier just timed out the webmail client.. after several minutes of waiting.> From my research, Courier maildrop appears to be what I need for > local delivery.I recommend you consider Dovecot's LDA "deliver".> Is it possible to use Maildrop for local delivery > with Dovecot?Yes, it is possible.> I also need the capability for users to set their own vacation > messages via a web page. Maildrop looks to handle this easily (by > allowing me to link the maildrop filter to a file with the vacation > message)Not sure how to do it with deliver, but I believe it is possible, but I have not looked at that yet. Is this a new install or something you are migrating?
On Nov 28, 2006, at 3:43 PM, Ejay Hire wrote:> Hello. What email client do you use? Most of the one's I've used (on > Windows) choke at 5k.Our users tend to use one of the following: Apple Mail Entourage (basically Outlook for Mac) Outlook Outlook Express Thunderbird and then there's the webmail system we provide. Apple Mail has virtually no limit on messages it will handle. I currently have over 500,000 emails in my Apple Mail. It stores email much like Dovecot; each email is in a separate file. This makes backups a breeze, which a reason to switch to a server that uses maildir. Entourage, Outlook Express and Outlook have problems if the data file exceeds 2GB. This is an ongoing problem and I'm hoping by keeping email on the server, the support headaches will be reduced. I'm not sure what limits Thunderbird has. I use Thunderbird to connect to the main directory for all email and it doesn't seem to have any trouble handling it. Currently, everyone is using POP3 but I want to move to IMAP. (Thunderbird is the only client that connects via IMAP on our systems) The motivation for moving to IMAP is primarily for spam handling. Instead of users contacting us for emails that might be caught as spam, the spam will be moved to a "junk mail" folder. Then the user can peruse the folder themselves to find any legit email improperly categorized as junk. Vacation messages is the other item that is prompting a change. Everyone is screaming for that feature.
Rick Hazey wrote:> Hi all. > > From my research, Courier maildrop appears to be what I need for local > delivery.It wouldn't hurt the list for you to tell us which criteria you judged the delivery agents by. Never know, someone might have an even better alternative. Or someone might just add in that feature you want to Dovecot. :) -- Curtis Maloney cmaloney at cardgate.net
I use YAA! (yet another autoresponder) to handle vacation messages,, but I feel the system could be made more efficient. When a user wants to set a vacation message, they go to a web page I created, and login (ldap, apache, authentication via apache's mod_auth_ldap). When they read the page, it reads the vacation message if any from mysql, and allows them to modify it. (PHP) When mail is received, postfix forks it to the mailbox and Yaa!. This means Yaa! Touches every message in the system. I wanted to do it all in LDAP, but I figured out I wasn't smart enough to make YAA!'s ldap support work, so I broke down and used Mysql. In other news, Novell stopped contributing developers to Hula, the open source exchange alternative today. -ejay -----Original Message----- From: dovecot-bounces at dovecot.org [mailto:dovecot-bounces at dovecot.org] On Behalf Of Rick Hazey Sent: Tuesday, November 28, 2006 3:01 PM To: dovecot at dovecot.org Subject: [Dovecot] considering dovecot Hi all. I'm making a case to use Dovecot over Courier and would like some feedback. I've searched the web extensively and have been unable to find any hard information regarding Dovecot's IMAP performance. I've got some pressure to use Courier but my gut tells me that Dovecot should be much faster. In particular, I will have typical users with mailboxes exceeding 10,000 emails and in some cases up to 100,000. Courier might be the "safe" choice but I'm not confident it can handle inboxes with that many messages. Dovecot, with its indexes, should be much, much faster. Can anyone point me to some benchmarks or production uses of dovecot that bear this out? From my research, Courier maildrop appears to be what I need for local delivery. Is it possible to use Maildrop for local delivery with Dovecot? Or is the Dovecot LDA needed to update the maildir indexes? I also need the capability for users to set their own vacation messages via a web page. Maildrop looks to handle this easily (by allowing me to link the maildrop filter to a file with the vacation message) but I don't see similar capability with the Sieve plugin. I do see where I can create a vacation message with Sieve but the text of the message seems to be required to reside within the Sieve script. Perhaps I'm missing something? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.