High availability mail server options

[Les Mikesell]

On Tue, 2005-10-04 at 10:52, Craig White wrote:

> 2. A Maildir setup would likely put each users folders in their home
> directories making it extremely difficult to backup the mail itself
> whereas something like cyrus-imapd has it's own mail store which can be
> put onto it's own partition and could simply be dumped.

If you are going to the trouble of providing redundancy, I'd think
you'd want to back up all of the user's data, not just email, so
having it all in the same place becomes an advantage for maildirs.
Also, the cyrus database format may have some internal dependencies
that will break if you copy it without shutting down.  The maildir
format was designed so the messages were self-contained and do
not need multiple operations to be atomic.  Dovecot tries to keep
an index which will most likely be wrong if copied when the user
is active, but it will rebuild it if it becomes inconsistent.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com