a question

[Yuval Kogman]

On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 14:07:38 +0000, perl wrote:
> My local council currently uses postfix to run their email system. 
> Apparently it is very slow (a minute or two to download each email for 
> anyone connected) and it doesn't 'do' meetings.
> 
> Because of this they want to replace it with MS Exchange Server at a 
> cost of £248,000 (over 5 years). Even at this cost they have calculated 
> this will save them £48,000 a year.

Postfix doesn't handle downloading of email, just transferring of
mail from mail mailservers to other mail servers (it's an MTA - mail
transfer agent, and an SMTP server).

It usually uses an MDA - mail delivery agent - to do the actual
shoving of mail into mailbox files or directories, probably
procmail..

The problem is probably with the IMAP or POP3 server, which you
haven't mentioned. That's the server responsible for letting the
email client get the actual messages from the mailboxes.

I think dovecot is "the new hip" IMAP server nowadays, but I haven't
tried it yet. I use courier IMAP and while it occasionally
misbehaves it's generally OK and the performance is reasonable.

Horrible performance is usually associated with UW imap, the IMAP
server that comes with PINE. Under certain scenarios it sometimes
has to rewrite the whole inbox mailbox file to change message flags
or to delete messages.

As for meetings - there are other things for calendar management and
they don't really have much to do with email on OSS software, email
clients occasionally integrate calendars with emails for managing
RSVPs but on the server it's technically unrelated.

-- 
  Yuval Kogman <nothingmuch at woobling.org>
http://nothingmuch.woobling.org  0xEBD27418