[plug] mta differences

[Craig Ringer]

On Tue, 2004-04-20 at 09:32, Michael Hunt wrote:
> Someone wrote :-
> 
> > FYI, while there are problems with Cyrus and Outlook clients, it's
> > used by a lot of _very_ large sites (big universities and ISPs, 
> > tens and hundreds of thousands of accounts), so I presume the issues
> > aren't impossible to solve. I haven't paid that much attention, as
> > I don't have to deal with OE or Lookout.
> 
> 
> I use Cyrus @ home with Evolution on my Linux work station (Debian Sid).

Hmm... what version? I assume it's 2.1.x not 2.2.x?

> My wife on the other hand uses Outlook 2000 on a Windows XP box.
> Consistently she gets an error message saying that the connection to the
> IMAP server timed out and that she is now offline (in the mail sense).

This has been discussed a couple of times on the Cyrus list, but I
haven't seen a conclusive solution. The problem sees very hard to pin
down, as most people don't see it at all.

Cyrus's IMAP timeout defaults to 30 minutes, and if OE isn't refreshing
the connection in some way during that time it _will_ get disconnected.
It should handle this gracefully, and silently reconnect when the user
next does anything. If it does not, perhaps you can enable IMAP IDLE
messages in OE (if it supports that), or increase the timeout to
something stupid. The following in /etc/imapd.conf should do it:

timeout: 1440

(24 hours)

> Question for those that are using Cyrus in a production environment what
> are you using for your MTA ???

Sendmail. We use exim at the gateway to accept incoming connections, but
all mail that appears to be to the right domain and looks basically
valid gets chucked through to our internal Sendmail server for
processing and delivery. Sendmail works extremely well with Cyrus, but I
know people use it with a _lot_ of different MTAs and I haven't heard of
any particular MTA-specific problems.

There are a few MTA-specific limitations - for example, only some MTAs
support authentication passthrough on LMTP - but you probably won't care
about them.

The more important question is what delivery method you're using. Like
with everything else in Cyrus, you have a couple of options. You can use
'deliver' (debian renames it to 'cyrdeliver' IIRC), but this is
depreciated and not recommended. You're much better off using LMTP in
the MTA, and delivering via Cyrus's LMTPd. 

Some people prefer `deliver` because they can use procmail, but most use
LMTP for the performance and reliability, and are happy with Sieve for
mail filtering anyway.

I'd recommend using LMTP if at all possible.

Craig Ringer