Mail system Suggestions

[Mikhail Goriachev]

Bill Moran wrote:
> 
> I don't know enought about Dovecot in particular to say whether or not
> the speed is _purely_ the result of caching (and being written in C).
> 
> But I can state a couple of reasons why the server-side cache helps.
> Keep in mind that IMAP is specifically designed as a clieng/server
> protocol.  I generally have the same mailbox open from three computers:
> my home, my work and my laptop.  When changes are made from one of these,
> the other two need to get synchronized.  Like most people, I try to
> keep my mails organized into folders that don't get too big, but I still
> end up with 1000s of mails in each folder.
> 
> Dovecot keeping a cache/index on the server side allows Dovecot to quickly
> provide information when the clients want to sync up.  When a mail client
> is first started, it needs to do the equivalent of "send me a list of all
> the emails in this folder".  If Dovecot needs to scan each and every message,
> it can be pretty slow, but if it has an index maintained that it can more
> or less just ship as is, that's much faster.  How often these types of
> "overall sync" operations occur under normal usage, I don't know.
> 
> While I'm not an expert, I believe that Courier maintains indexes as well.
> 


Fair enough, thanks for your thoughts. I guess I'll give dovecot a spin
when the right time comes (apparently it's still in beta). Meanwhile
I'll stick with courier-imap.


Cheers,
Mikhail.


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Mikhail Goriachev
Webanoide

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