Re: Imap Packages

From: Matthew Schumacher <schu@schu.net>
Date: Wed Oct 27 2004 - 11:14:37 AKDT

Jim,

I don't want to get into the mail battle with other on the list, but I
thought I would mention what I like and why:

Sendmail: Between a perl based milter, the flexible config format, and
the new socketmap feature, you can pretty much do anything. Since the
filters are running as a daemon, with sendmail passing the mail though a
unix socket, you get very little performance penalty where most other
mailers call an external perl filter which introduces a hefty
performance hit to the mail process.

Cyrus: Mail is passed to cyrus from sendmail via the LMTP protocol on a
unix socket so there is no lda to call from the shell, the lmtpd server
is already running in memory. Cyrus also uses something similar to the
maildir format (each message in it's own file) but it also maintains a
cache and index file which (according to
http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/~dpc22/cyrus/) features:

# No expensive stat() operations required when opening mailfolder (other
file per message stores can work around this one by building information
into filenames).
# Don't have to open() every message for threading or searching
# Can return BODYSTRUCTURE and individual MIME attachments without
having to parse message

I could go on, but the point is that the sendmail/cyrus solution is
fast, has very little filter overhead compared to other solutions
because it avoids calling an external filter which soaks time to start
(and compile if perl) on each message, has an aggregator which allows it
to scale very well, and uses the flexible cyrus-sasl authentication
library which allows you to authenticate against virtually anything.

HTH,

schu
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Received on Wed Oct 27 11:14:43 2004

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