[rhelv6-beta-list] cyrus-imapd - missing or unsupported in RHEL6?

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Sun, May 2, 2010 at 2:59 AM, Vesselin Kolev <vlk at lcpe.uni-sofia.bg> wrote:
> Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
>>
>> Choice is good: that doesn't mean you have to support all choices. My
>> experience with Cyrus has been,..... unfortunate, and I found dovecot
>> to be far simpler to build, configure, and maintain.
>>
>> Don't get me *started* on qmaill......
>>
>>
>
> First, don't let lack of experience limit you!

Experience is the problem. I've been dealing with IMAP since.... oh,
my. wu-imapd, before the year 2000.

> Second, the present mail list is for administrators and IT professionals,
> not for haters (!!!).
> Third, don't try to limit someone's choice and respect the work of others.
>
> Did you ever try to build and support a large-scale virtual IMAP hosting
> with:

10,000 servers with centralized SMTP, and business environments up to
500 users on my servers. Dear god, yes, I do consulting right now
because of travels to Europe with my family, but yes.

[ list of particular circumstances and tools clipped ]

Given the variety of setups I've worked with, yes, I've dealt with
each of those components although often in different guise. (Except
LMTP, never used it. I've taken to using "exim", which does complete
smarthosting rather well in ways that sendmail and postfix do not
fully support)

>From experience, dovecot handles a few hundred users quite easily,
even a thousand without too much difficulty if you're sensible about
your resource allocation. Cyrus, for both small and large setups, was
destabilizing. Database corruption occurred repeatedly, and features
you've mentioned (such as shared IMAP mailboxes) were usually better
handled by mailing list software with archival, or NNTP services.
(Transferring bug reports on email services to NNTP was a godsend:
people's comments about email services didn't require email to work to
be able to read.)

Databases were more necessary with older file systems that didn't
handle thousands of files in single directories well, but since the
release of ext3 and ext4 (and other higher performance filesystems),
those have been tractable and allow servers to simply store the
material and reference it directly, rather than rely on another
component to retain state and synchronization with it. That's been a
traditional source of difficulty with the Cyrus toolkit.

cyrus-imapd is in the upstream Fedora releases, such as Fedora 13, so
you may get your desire. I'm not a RedHat employee, so don't know
their internal release plans. But I'd take its absence as helpful by
steering administrators of lightweight IMAP servers away from a
complex and historically fragile toolkit.