Managing IMAP

Strengths and Weaknesses of Cyrus

Although you can bring up the UW IMAP server on a multipurpose Unix box with little or no forethought, the same cannot be said of Cyrus. Even under the best of circumstances, putting Cyrus on your machine is a major challenge. The only way to know if you want to “go there” is to weigh the strengths and weaknesses of Cyrus within the context of your own needs and resources.

The strengths of the Cyrus server are that it’s popular, scalable, and secure. Here are the strengths in detail:

Popular

Cyrus is very popular. The community of Cyrus administrators communicates and cooperates via the info-cyrus mailing list, which has over 400 subscribers. The Cyrus server is downloaded over 3,500 times every month. In other words, if you operate a Cyrus site, you’re in good company. The attitude of other Cyrus sites towards questions and problems posted to the list is always helpful and cooperative. The Cyrus developers often contribute helpful advice and tips to the list, as well.

Scalable

Cyrus supports quotas on mailboxes—your /var/mail partition will never fill up unexpectedly. Growth of your mailstore can be controlled using quotas and IMAP partitions.

Secure

Cyrus natively implements the Kerberos v4 SASL mechanism.

Supports shared mailboxes

Cyrus supports shared folders by way of ACLs and allows concurrent read-write connections from more than one user.

Here are some of the weaknesses of the Cyrus server:

Cyrus doesn’t use Unix mail format

Cyrus’s ...