imap server performance benchmarks

[Mark Felder]

On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 14:33:53 -0600, Weldon Godfrey  
<weldon at excelsusphoto.com> wrote:

> I would highly recommend looking at Dovecot.  I have used courier for
> several ISPs then switched to Dovecot on my last install.  Its ability  
> for
> caching the index per user is of great performance advantage if you  
> choose
> to leverage an IMAP based webmail solution (like Roundcube, or even
> Squirrelmail, but I would recommend Roundcube over Squrrel)...especially  
> if
> you are going to deal with mailboxes of tens of thousands of messages.

I concur. We use Dovecot at work and even put the indexes on Intel SSDs.  
My boss's mailbox is actually 1.2 million messages. That's pretty insane.

For my personal email I prefer Archiveopteryx which sanitizes, normalizes,  
and deduplicates your email. There are caveats (breaks gpg), but I find it  
to be wicked fast -- faster than Dovecot on my server.

Here's an annoying problem: You have a filesystem with 9 million messages  
in Maildirs. Backing this up or even rsyncing this sucks. Now imagine  
being able to use database replication and use database dumps for your  
backups. Pretty slick. You lose the beautiful power of shell utilities,  
though....