Brad - We have a large ( 20K ) userbase, and I would like very much to change to Cyrus. However, it is not a drop in replacement for UW-IMAP from the user's perspective. They will need to change their root folder path, etc. We have been thinking about this for 6 months. It will probably take another year to plan, document, and implement it. If you don't have those same sorts of user problems, you are using large mailboxes, and you want some more management flexibilty, Cyrus is probably your best bet.
>From your perspective, in the migration you have a lot of mail to move from one server to another. There is a book on IMAP from O'Reilly which talks about migration strategies. You might consider something like perdition ( http://www.vergenet.net/linux/perdition/ ) to help manage the migration, so you can have both UW-IMAP and Cyrus running and a central perdition server that manages the per-user connection. ( Sorry for the digression from Cyrus here. ) The other option is to look at the bandwidth to the current IMAP server, check memory on the system, since UW-IMAP consumes a lot of memory for large mailboxes. You could use mbx indexed files instead of the plain flat files with UW-IMAP. From imap-200./docs/CONFIG: " mbx format is encouraged if at all possible; " mbx format is an indexed format that you can't edit directly, but has performance advantages over the unix format mailbox. There is a lot of documentation online for how to use mbx, and it is outside of the scope of this mailing list to address it. But it may not be your silver bullet. You should probably look at network throughput first, disk I/O, and memory before you start making big changes to your current system. Good Luck. Christopher Crowley Technology Services Tulane University [EMAIL PROTECTED] 504.314.2535 PGP Key ID: 0x7CF18FDB ----- Original Message ----- From: "Brad" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Jason Fesler" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "Cyrus Info Mailing List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, July 28, 2003 12:24 AM Subject: Re: Cyrus to replace UW? > Thanks for your reply Jason. > > I will look into it, although from your description it may be a bit beyond me. > I wonder if Linux will ever be ready for the masses? It is still way too > technical for the average user. > > However, I'll have a go. ;-) > > Cheers, > Brad > > On Monday 28 July 2003 14:53, you wrote: > > > I have a Red Hat 9 mail server running UW imap and I find that mail > > > retrieval from both Windows and Linux email clients is very slow, even to > > > the extent that the email client sometimes times out waiting for the imap > > > server to respond. > > > > I regularly open 20,000+ message mailboxes with pine against cyrus. This > > generally takes <2 seconds to open for me. "Normal" size mailboxes don't > > take any perceivable time at all to open. Your mileage may vary with > > windows clients, as they typically want to download all the headers - > > however, they won't be stalled on the server end scanning > > /var/mail/lusername. > > > > > I have heard that the Cyrus imap server is somewhat faster and was > > > wondering if replacing the UW imap server with the Cyrus server would > > > solve my problem. > > > > It might. The road there is long though. If you are a do-it-yourselfer > > who doesnt' mind getting dirty, reading *docs*, etc, you'll find that > > cyrus is way way worth setting up from a performance and security point of > > view. I won't say setting up cyrus was easy for me though. Persistance, > > use of docs, use of the web search features of your favorite search > > engine, etc all pay off big dividends. >