Inclusion of cyrus-imapd and mimedefang

Florin Andrei florin at sgi.com
Fri Jul 25 20:19:53 UTC 2003


On Thu, 2003-07-24 at 20:09, Wil Cooley wrote:
> 
> I wrote to Simon Matter who has maintained Cyrus IMAP RPMs for 2.1 and
> whose RPMs are indubitably the most widely used for 2.1.

Indeed.

> He expressed
> interest in continuing development of his packages but wasn't aware of
> the new development model.

Apart from the clever authentication scheme, from shared folders and the
very scalable architecture, IMO one of the best features of Cyrus is
Sieve, the mail filtering language. To be able to filter messages
server-side _without_ scripting hacks bolted onto the daemon Home
Depot-style (not to mention procmail and stuff like that) - that's
amazing.

The whole point about IMAP is mobility - the users are able to go
places, change their workstations and yet access their mail folders in
an uniform fashion. Hence, the server-side filtering is such a natural
development, i'm amazed there aren't more IMAP daemons with native
filtering schemes. Well, probably everyone thought classic scripting is
enough, which is not, at least not when you want to scale things up.

On my personal mail server, i need to access mail from at least two
different workstations (both running Evolution at this moment) and one
Webmail gateway. Not having a proper server-side filtering scheme makes
it very difficult for me to maintain a consistent structure and content
of my e-mail.
That's why i'm planning to move my personal server on to Cyrus, even
though it's a really small system, with very few users (and Cyrus might
seem to be overkill for it).

I think the inclusion of an "official" Cyrus package in Red Hat is a
_very_ good thing. Make it the higher-end IMAP server, and use something
else for simple and straightforward installations (i forgot what's the
name of the other imapd proposal for Severn).

Of course, UW must stay around for a while, but having three different
IMAP daemons is kinda too much. Or not. :-)
<shrug>

-- 
Florin Andrei

"Never send a human to do a machine's job." - Agent Smith





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