The Future of Cyrus

Cyrus is a popular IMAP server. The Cyrus server distribution is downloaded over 3,500 times a month, and there are dozens of sites running Cyrus on a large scale. Three commercial IMAP solutions are based on Cyrus. There is a very active Cyrus mailing list that uses Cyrus as a context for discussing implementation of enterprise messaging systems. Cyrus is here to stay.

Version 2.0a is the latest release. Version 1.6.22 is still considered the stable version at the time of this writing, but a large number of sites still run Version 1.5.19 in their production environments.

Versions of Cyrus later than 1.5.19 have begun to move away from cleartext authentication to methods supported by SASL. Project Cyrus needed to offer more authentication methods for people to use. It’s possible to configure Cyrus 1.6.22 to work with cleartext authentication, but it requires some extra work (e.g., you must either configure SASL or PAM appropriately or change the ownership on your shadow password file). The introduction of completely new code into the previously comfortingly consistent Cyrus code base has turned a population of easygoing mail system administrators into a curmudgeon collective.

Many sites have held back from upgrading to newer versions of Cyrus because changing a site’s authentication mechanism has serious implications to the infrastructure. Sites that are not ready to replace shadow password authentication with another mechanism may not want to open a security ...

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