cyrus vs UW imap

[Craig White]

On Fri, 2005-08-26 at 13:31 -0600, Philip Prindeville wrote:
> Les Mikesell wrote:
> 
> >On Fri, 2005-08-26 at 13:13, T. Horsnell wrote:
> >
> >  
> >
> >>When we addressed these
> >>issues, mail response improved dramatically, even with the
> >>compatible-but-horribly-slow mbox format (which we maintain
> >>partly because of inertiia and partly because many users
> >>want to read their mail with different mailers depending
> >>where they are)
> >>    
> >>
> >
> >I've had the same kind of inertia and was wondering if it
> >would be possible to configure dovecot to read mbox format
> >in the spool directory but read and create maildir format
> >in additional folders?   Or to configure delivery per user
> >with .procmailrc files and have dovecot figure out which
> >format to use on the fly?
> >
> >  
> >
> 
> Part of the install process of the RPM could be improved to include
> mailbox migration in an automated format...  And perhaps automatically
> creating mailboxes for everyone with a uid >= 500 (whether they
> currently have a mailbox or not).
> 
> Installing Outlook, Netscape, Thunderbird... all try to import mailboxes.
> Why not for cyrus as well?  The integration would sendmail and spamassassin
> could be better, too (assuming that one isn't using a milter, that is).
> 
> Personally I like the way Cyrus works, but on the other hand the learning
> curve initially is steeper than it has to be.
> 
> Having nested mailboxes rocks.  Too bad dovecot doesn't support that.
----
yeah - nested mailboxes too...

Cyrus has no code whatsoever for migrating users - Andrew Morgan has
some code for doing it but you cannot retain the IMAP flags and thus, it
all shows up as new mail. You can use a little program called 'imapsync'
to move the mail from one server to another - dissimilar doesn't matter
and it preserves the imap flags (seen/replied etc.) but it's not very
fast as it operates like an IMAP client and requires the
username/password combination for both servers/systems.

Since cyrus has a number of perl interfaces for it, it's not hard to
create a script from a list of names and create the mailboxes, etc.

Craig