IAMP servers in FreeBSD for ISP

[Francisco Reyes]

Brian Candler writes:

> Conversely, it also means that it is not safe to use with NFS backends. So
> if you already have a good and/or expensive NFS appliance, you won't want to
> use Cyrus.

Thankfully we don't have any big investment in an expensive NFS appliance. 
 
> Remember that Courier has a proxy front-end built in, so you can use a proxy
> cluster instead of an NFS cluster (or even have some accounts on Courier and
> proxy others to Cyrus; a very nice migration tool)

We tried the proxy once.. but the proxy machine was keeping an instance 
running during the connection. Basically we saw a connection on the proxy 
machine and another in the destination machine. Not sure if this is how it 
is supposed to work or if we missconfigured.
 
> If you do want to go the Cyrus route, there are some good papers from
> Cambridge University in the UK describing their setup:

Will check them up. Thanks.
 
> Actually I have very good experience of courier-imap + exim in a large ISP
> environment, but the vast majority of users were POP3, not IMAP.

We have a mix and some users large directories with thousands of files.  

> although Courier's sqwebmail has a not particularly pretty interface, it
> *does* perform very well under heavy usage

Even with Inbox with large number of files?
Say 5,000+

Unfortunately it's common for our users to let their mail pile up..
Specially the Spam folder. Sometimes they can't even clean their spam folder 
and we had to write a program to delete mail from the spam folder after so 
many days (based on customer setting).