> This is not so much a problem as an 'I wonder'... > > I currently use dovecot imap with maildir to support several dozen > folders containing several gigabytes of mail using Thunderbird as a mail > client. This "works" - but I am surprised by the number of imap > processes that the mail server is running to support a single > Thunderbird client... it appears that there is one connection per folder > and one process per connection... which seems (to me at least) to be > overkill.
Having never used dovecot, I can't comment on this. But maybe this can be changed in a configuration file somewhere? But I think this is caused by the client, not by the server. > I'm aware that there are lots of IMAP clients I might have chosen - > Courier; UWImap, Cyrus and dovecot... but I'm finding it difficult to > establish details which would help me choose the most appropriate server > for my purposes. In order of importance, I'm interested in: > > 1. Stability and reliability. > 2. Scalability to handle a very large number of 'folders' for a > relatively small number of end-users. > 3. Performance (primarily with respect to 'new mail' > notifications, but also, to a lesser extent, with searching archived > messages. > > I'd be interested to hear any anecdotes from Gentooists who have > addressed a similar question recently... > > Steve I have a similar requirement for my emails, esp. with the mailinglists I can end up with some very large folders (100,000+ messages in one of my folders) I found that Courier-IMAP didn't manage to handle these folders very well, and I had to split these folders up into seperate folders for this to work. I have since moved to Cyrus and I find that this works easier, even with only 2 users using it, it currently handles over 7Gb of stored email. Only once had a problem with one of the folders, which was easily fixed. The cause for this was most likely a minor corruption on the filesystem when my server lost power. (UPS is unreliable, but that's a different issue) As for the performance with regards to notifications, I find that the mailclient is responsible for this, rather then the server. Doing a quick check for new emails is very quick with Cyrus, Courier didn't scale very well in my experience. I hope this helps, and that others can come with more information, including some benchmarks, if these exist. As a final note, I don't think either Courier or Cyrus have ever lost a single email, but I have never done a full check for this. -- Joost Roeleveld -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
