After 19 Years CMU Discontinues Cyrus IMAP In Favor Of Microsoft Exchange And Gmail (cmu.edu) 72
Long-time Slashdot reader Hobart writes: The Cyrus IMAP server, created by and for Carnegie Mellon University, has lost support of its founding institution. As of last fall, they announced that student and faculty email will be run on Microsoft Exchange, or Google's Gmail suite of apps. The company FastMail seems to be the primary driver of Cyrus IMAPd software now, per their December blog post. Are any Slashdot readers migrating their Cyrus-based services, or are there compelling reasons to chose it over the competition?
I already left.. (Score:4, Interesting)
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I agree with this. I have installed & maintained some largish Cyrus installations (10,000 - 20,000 mail boxes). It works well but is complicated. Dovecot is what I have used for my more modest recent uses.
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what "separate configuration files"? My install (granted, it's old) has TWO config files (cyrus.conf and imapd.conf -- and the sasldb but that's systemwide)
Behind the scenes, yes, cyrus has many files. But you don't mess with them.
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I agree, that SASL is stupid, but I only had to set it up once... I've been a happy user of the IMAP-server for many years now — and the configuration I created originally remains valid and "just works" with the latest versions of the software.
Frankly, I think it is insane to trust e-mail to proprietary software for which you do not have sources... MS Exchange?!? Eeww...
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Cyrus IMAP works well for me. Setup was not particularly easy, but once I got past that, it has been solid. This is for my personal domain, so I cannot speak of larger installations.
Somehow, I doubt Carnegie Mellon had an issue with finding someone that knows Cyrus well. ;)
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Similar story here. I used UW IMAP server and migrated to Dovecot when support for it was dropped by Debian. I tried Cyrus briefly. I don't remember what the exact issues were, I recall not being able to tweak the configuration to mimic UW's operation closely enough. Don't cite me on this, first because I'm completely unciteworthy and second because this happened years ago and my memories of it have faded some.
I love IMAP and use it exclusively for my e-mail servers. I can connect with multiple clients on m
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Agree. Dovecot works great.
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CMU Confirms: IMAP Is Dying (Score:2, Insightful)
no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft
RIP
Re: CMU Confirms: IMAP Is Dying (Score:3)
Meanwhile at the University of Washington (Score:5, Funny)
IMAP server support continues. The sole remaining developer, Darrin, recently attempted to escape - but he was quickly apprehended by UW Police and returned to his closet.
Re:Meanwhile at the University of Washington (Score:4, Funny)
I hope he's not pine-ing away.
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I started with Cyrus, then after UWash IMAP got its mbx format, I moved to that, in order to simplify. Then a few years later I moved to Dovecot, and have been there since.
Great choice... (Score:2)
if you are thinking exclusively about money and nothing else. -_-
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"My hand is in your wallet" - Andrew Carnegie
A commonly seen play on the actual quote "My heart is in the work" at CMU during my years there.
Re:It's complicated. (Score:4, Insightful)
Everything it does, dovecot does better.
Yup - switched a decade ago and never looked back. Thanks for '04-'07 tho.
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Of all those things, corruption is the only one that's true. But each message is it's own file in the various spool directories. The various db's that can be corrupted can also be completely regenerated from the spool. I've done it many times; never lost a message.
So... (Score:4, Insightful)
Which administrator is getting the kickback from Microsoft for this particular choice?
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Could very well be nobody did. Like a certain other university I could mention, they might've hired "business managers" to make the university run more like a "business", which to such small minds means that every computer must run windows and all other software must come from the same vendor. "Standardisation", see?
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Very true. And those MBA "business managers" probably never heard of nor can they spell IMAP.
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Are any Slashdot readers migrating their Cyrus-based services, or are there compelling reasons to chose it over the competition?
I must admit: I do not know much about Cyrus-based services, so can't speak to that.
So the rest of your post is going to be off-topic. Got it.
I will however talk about GMail and my frustration(s) with it.
1: It's ugly and cumbersome to use by default. An Outlook-like interface has proven itself. To make GMail look like Outlook, one must install and enable some 3rd party add-on.
*cough* [slashdot.org]
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1: It's ugly and cumbersome to use by default. An Outlook-like interface has proven itself. To make GMail look like Outlook, one must install and enable some 3rd party add-on.
Please do not mix subjective terms like "ugly" with objective terms like "proven". You're confusing yourself when you do.
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1: It's ugly and cumbersome to use by default. An Outlook-like interface has proven itself. To make GMail look like Outlook, one must install and enable some 3rd party add-on.
Please do not mix subjective terms like "ugly" with objective terms like "proven". You're confusing yourself when you do.
So in other words you have no substantive objection to OP's criticism of Gmail.
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I really can't argue with something that is his subjective opinion. I have a different opinion, but I'm surprised you're interested in that.
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He pointed out pretty clearly a number of reasons why Gmail, objectively sucks. You didn't point out anything, why even bother posting?
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Have you always been retarded, or is your MAGA hat too tight? The poster complaining about Gmail listed a bunch of stuff he doesn't like. None of them are objectively bad.
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It can be extraordinarily popular and stick suck, which it is and it does. Another example of that is Windows. It is not extraordinarily popular because it doesn't suck, it is extraordinarily popular for other reasons, some of which are nothing to be proud of.
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He pointed out pretty clearly a number of reasons why Gmail, objectively sucks. You didn't point out anything, why even bother posting?
You still haven't pointed out anything. I will point out something: Gmail does suck. It is only Google's network effect monopoly control that keeps people using it. They will come to regret it, as Google's increasingly high handed business model of privacy invasion starts to bite hard.
Who uses IMAP in 2017?? (Score:2, Insightful)
Today people need more than email and calendar, Skype, and meeting options.
Unfortunately, the community defined the imap standard IEEE but no calendar and meeting and freebusy functionality so MS defined the standard instead.
Email might be fine for student uses but is incompatible for the needs of staff.
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I'm glad you don't live in my universe.
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Ugh.
The fork of Owncloud?
I heard of Owncloud about 5 years ago after I gave up on CalDav to replace Gmail as a solution which would allow me to do calendaring and scheduling, contacts, notes etc. on my phone and my desktop.
My friends who were once enthusiastic about running Owncloud eventually gave up on it as a buggy mess and stopped talking about it. E.g. https://github.com/mail-in-a-box/mailinabox/issues/514 [github.com]
I asked around about an "Owncloud hosted environment", hoping maybe a service maintained
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It might have been too early in OwnCloud's life to find the hosted providers. I'm glad to see they're out there now and have some geographic diversity.
IMAP isn't the issue for Linux. It's interoperable calendaring and scheduling, contacts, etc, etc. which have been the issue. The summary leaves out this important detail from their decision: ".. have transitioned to Exchange providing an integrated solution with mobile support and advanced scheduling functionality"
The organizational issues such as "w
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There is no connection _if_ you use separate mail and calendar services, and you don't connect them.
There is no connection required unless you want to do things like, oh, send meeting invites or update calendars based on invite responses... say. Obviously if you only ever meet yourself, that's not a problem.
If you want to do that, then you need to connect your mail and calendar services with, say, an iMIP service/connector - you know, the standard specifically for connecting (non-MS) mail and calendar serv
Courier IMAPd (Score:2)
I've been running Courier IMAPd since 2003 for just my personal email. I think I picked it because it was simple to configure. It's been running just fine ever since. If I were providing email service to a large group of users, I would want to evaluate different options, but it's been rock solid for my use.
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Monoculture (Score:3)
E-mail is essentially a legacy system... (Score:2)
Not quite dead yet (Score:5, Interesting)
While FastMail is based on Cyrus IMAP, and is providing resources for its development and documentation, I think it is to early to declare Cyrus completely finished. In terms of collaboration features, the addition of CardDAV and CalDAV support a few years ago helped somewhat. Lack of its own file sharing tools is a serious limitation, but FastMail has managed a degree of integration with Dropbox.
Hold off on a variation of the dead parrot sketch for the time being!!
Don't tell my client (Score:1)
my achy breaky client
I just don't think he'd understand
Exchange IMAP (Score:3)
Exchange IMAP performance is atrocious, not to mention completely broken from a standards point of view.
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Institutionally, their culture is pretty much dead set against spending any time on standards compliance, let alone interoperabililty. Yes, it is partially intentional, but in reality, it is just incentivized laziness.
They don't want (let alone need) any other vendor to interoperate, so they don't spend any time hiring people who care about that sort of thing; those type of people don't last long at MS.
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This is probably by design. Microsoft hates mail. Actually they hate standard-compliant everything.
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Yes, but Exchange everything is atrocious, so users quickly become accustomed to it.
Exchange: Managing user expectations since 1993.