From: Bruno Saverio Delbono (bruno.s.delbonomail.ac)
Date: Tue Jun 01 2004 - 15:31:12 CDT

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* Matt Krause (memattkrause.net) wrote:
> Forgive me for writing out this to the Postfix group, but I was wanting
> the opinion of Postfix users as to what the best POP/IMAP server is to
> run over the top of Postfix.

I will vouch for Cyrus. http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/

I've installed it in an installation with anywhere from 2-3 mail
accounts to over 100,000. I found cyrus to overperform in many different
areas. If you prefer a more "accessible" message store, you might choose
Courier. From some googling around here is the consesus of the
differences between courier and cyrus

o Courier uses a standard mailbox format (Maildir), whereas Cyrus uses a
unique one.
o Cyrus comes with a proxy module for scalability.
o Both support ACLs.
o Cyrus supports single-instance message store (Courier does not)
o Courier can be a bit easier to setup

With Cyrus' format, it's a "single message per file" format with the
IMAP folder structure built in a directory structure, but each folder
has an index file so that accessing the headers of a message (which is
done very frequently, for example, when displaying the message summary
window) is done very quickly. Having the headers indexed into a single
file in each folder means that the server does not have to do an
open/read/close for every message in a folder.

I use Cyrus because of it's speed and flexibility.

I think the general consensus is that Cyrus is _the_ enterprise IMAP
server in the OSS world. It scales fabulously to large user bases. Even
Sun iPlanet Messaging Server/Netscape Messaging server uses cyrus with
some places with mail volume close to 10 million/day and about a million
acounts (Source: Info-iMS Mailing List/google)

-Bruno

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