[Dovecot] Dovecot vs. Courier-Imap

[Marten Lehmann]

Hello,

I've heard of both and I already tested and installed both, but I'm not
sure which one is better, since both just seem to work and I can't see a
difference, except from the point how it's set up and configured. Where
are the drawbacks of each one, where are the benefits? I also tested
cyrus before, but cyrus is not working well with maildirs. I'm not that
into detail of both projects, maybe you can explain a bit. Thanks in
advance for every answer!

Regards
Marten

[Kimura Fuyuki]

At Sun, 16 May 2004 00:58:27 +0200,

Post by Marten Lehmann
I've heard of both and I already tested and installed both, but I'm not
sure which one is better, since both just seem to work and I can't see a
difference, except from the point how it's set up and configured. Where
are the drawbacks of each one, where are the benefits? I also tested
cyrus before, but cyrus is not working well with maildirs. I'm not that
into detail of both projects, maybe you can explain a bit. Thanks in
advance for every answer!

I believe Dovecot is much faster than Courier. Dovecot's index caching
is very smart and works well even on huge mailboxes.

-- fuyuki

[Marten Lehmann]

Post by Kimura Fuyuki
I believe Dovecot is much faster than Courier. Dovecot's index caching
is very smart and works well even on huge mailboxes.

How many people are actively working on both projects? Who is using
dovecot? In which environments? Has someone moved from Courier-Imap to
Dovecot? Which of both has the smaller footprint (e.g. memory usage)?

Regards
Marten

[Kimura Fuyuki]

At Sun, 16 May 2004 05:36:45 +0200,

Post by Marten Lehmann
How many people are actively working on both projects? Who is using
dovecot? In which environments? Has someone moved from Courier-Imap to
Dovecot? Which of both has the smaller footprint (e.g. memory usage)?

I've experienced at least four imap daemons on FreeBSD; UW's, Cyrus,
Courier and (of course) Dovecot. Forget about the first one. Cyrus's
would be most popular and is actually quite fast, but I don't like
some of its behavior details. Courier-IMAP is works well on Maildir
except that it is fairly slow since it never caches mail indexes. (Is
it still true for recent versions?)

My current choice is Dovecot. It works just fine more than a year. It
is so fast and eats little memory.

In short, you should read a blurb by the author himself. It's not a
bubble.

http://www.dovecot.org/

-- fuyuki

[Adrian Ulrich]

Hi,


Dovecot performs very well if you have a very huge mailbox.
I have a mailbox with about 30 folders with ~ 8000 messages
per folder (with 200 new messages each day)

Running Courier-Imap, you couldn't access the mailbox, it was
so slooooww. Courier also segfaulted very often.


After switching to dovecot, everything runs fine.
No crash and its FAST.

And dovecot uses less memory/cpu.
It runs also fast enough for my old 486 with 66mhz and 64mb ram.


-- Adrian

[security officer]

Post by Adrian Ulrich
After switching to dovecot, everything runs fine.
No crash and its FAST.

Yep, I also changed some courier-imaps to dovecot, since courier have
some mystic problems with outlook 2003.

No any problem with dovecot. Only thing that is missing is maildir++
quota, hope it is soon implemented.

Anyway, dovecot supports easily vpopmail+qmail combination that I use on
most mail servers.

--
Eero

[Matthias Andree]

Post by Adrian Ulrich
Dovecot performs very well if you have a very huge mailbox.
I have a mailbox with about 30 folders with ~ 8000 messages
per folder (with 200 new messages each day)
Running Courier-Imap, you couldn't access the mailbox, it was
so slooooww. Courier also segfaulted very often.

While I have hardly used large mailboxes with Courier, I've _never_ seen
it segfault.

Dovecot is faster, but lacks some features that Courier offers, the
NAMESPACE extension, for instance.