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After 19 Years CMU Discontinues Cyrus IMAP In Favor Of Microsoft Exchange And Gmail (cmu.edu)

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?

48 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. I already left.. by Ostrich25 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I migrated off Cyrus years ago (to Dovecot) because for my small installation needs, Cyrus was obscenely overcomplicated. I also hate Cyrus SASL with the heat of a thousand suns.

    1. Re:I already left.. by Alain+Williams · · Score: 2

      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.

    2. Re:I already left.. by mi · · Score: 1

      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...

      --
      In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
    3. Re:I already left.. by Ded+Bob · · Score: 1

      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. ;)

    4. Re:I already left.. by UPi · · Score: 2

      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 multiple devices, organize my folders and keep my inbox tidy. Well as tidy as inboxes get with developers.

    5. Re:I already left.. by nyet · · Score: 1

      Agree. Dovecot works great.

    6. Re:I already left.. by Cramer · · Score: 1

      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.

    7. Re:I already left.. by cthulhu11 · · Score: 1

      Ended up with a circular dependency with Cyrus that prevented recompilation. Also went to Dovecot. Apologies to jgm

  2. CMU Confirms: IMAP Is Dying by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft

    RIP

    1. Re: CMU Confirms: IMAP Is Dying by Type44Q · · Score: 2

      Now that CMU sold their entire robotics division to Uber, maybe they can develop their AI in an Excel macro.

  3. Meanwhile at the University of Washington by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 4, 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.

    --
    #DeleteChrome
    1. Re:Meanwhile at the University of Washington by Nethead · · Score: 3, Funny

      I hope he's not pine-ing away.

      --
      -- I have a private email server in my basement.
    2. Re:Meanwhile at the University of Washington by dpilot · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
    3. Re:Meanwhile at the University of Washington by LynnwoodRooster · · Score: 1

      Better than trying to tunnel his way out!

      --
      Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
    4. Re:Meanwhile at the University of Washington by Hobart · · Score: 1

      I hope he's not pine-ing away.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

      --
      o/~ Join us now and share the software ...
  4. Great choice... by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 1

    if you are thinking exclusively about money and nothing else. -_-

    --
    Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
    1. Re:Great choice... by No+Longer+an+AC · · Score: 1

      "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.

  5. So... by cheesybagel · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Which administrator is getting the kickback from Microsoft for this particular choice?

    1. Re:So... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

      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?

    2. Re:So... by Miser · · Score: 1

      Very true. And those MBA "business managers" probably never heard of nor can they spell IMAP.

    3. Re:So... by awtbfb · · Score: 1

      Exchange is needed by specific units but most are going to Gmail and the shift was inevitable. A vast majority of the students prefer Gmail over IMAP and usually forward their mail to Gmail anyway. Similar trends are visible in the junior staff and faculty.

  6. Re:Hope they look close & rule out GMail... by SeaFox · · Score: 1

    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*

  7. Re:It's complicated. by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Everything it does, dovecot does better.

    Yup - switched a decade ago and never looked back. Thanks for '04-'07 tho.

    --
    My God, it's Full of Source!
    OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
  8. Re:Hope they look close & rule out GMail... by OrangeTide · · Score: 2

    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.

    --
    “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
  9. Who uses IMAP in 2017?? by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1, 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.

    1. Re:Who uses IMAP in 2017?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I'm glad you don't live in my universe.

    2. Re:Who uses IMAP in 2017?? by jarle.aase · · Score: 1

      I hope you are trolling. If not, have you heard about nextcloud? No need to be Faust just because you want modern facilities. There are open source alternatives to mail, calendar, online docs, cloud storage and pretty much anything else. If you sell your soul to the Devil, you do so because you want to. Not because you need to.

    3. Re:Who uses IMAP in 2017?? by Dr.+Evil · · Score: 1

      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

      I asked around about an "Owncloud hosted environment", hoping maybe a service maintained by Owncloud staff or crazy developers might be out there offering high availability. The FOSS-heads balked at it saying "why would you want a hosted Owncloud???, it's all about data privacy and control!". No such service existed.

      All of this has been a total waste of time, as I've been running on a hosted Exchange environment for 7 years now and have no problems... well except that Thunderbird Exchange support is... barely tolerable, and Evolution itself is barely tolerable. The OWA web client, Android calendar and iPhone calendar are much better than Evolution and Thunderbird for calendaring.

    4. Re:Who uses IMAP in 2017?? by jarle.aase · · Score: 1

      AFAIK, OwnCloud was forked by the original developers, after some policy disagreements with greedy investors. I was skeptical, but after listening to a FLOSS weekly pod-cast about nextcloud, I'm actually quite exited about the project. The version of OwnCloud shipped with Debian stable has been rock solid to me for years. For hosted OwnCloud, there are many alternatives: https://owncloud.org/providers.... The same goes for nextcloud: https://nextcloud.com/provider.... Thunderbird works well with standard IMAP servers.

    5. Re: Who uses IMAP in 2017?? by ray-auch · · Score: 1

      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 services. Exchange just provides a mail and calendar service that is pre-connected without installing and configuring a connector, Outlook provides a client that shows both. Interestingly if you don't use Outlook, the built-in Windows email and calendar apps are separate - or rather they appear so, but you can't send meeting invites from Calendar until you configure an account in Mail...

    6. Re:Who uses IMAP in 2017?? by Dr.+Evil · · Score: 1

      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 "who does Bob report to?", "How do I book this room?", "How do I coordinate free time on Alice, Bob, Carol and Dave's calendar?", "Which meeting rooms are available at that time?".

      For that matter, Exchange also gives you some MDM tools, server-side rules (so you don't need to depend on Thunderbird to be running so that your email filters into the right folder on you phone), etc.

      I'll keep an eye on NextCloud, hopefully it finally replaces Exchange for me, but I'm not holding my breath.

  10. Courier IMAPd by crow · · Score: 1

    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.

    1. Re:Courier IMAPd by jarle.aase · · Score: 1

      Many years ago, I administered the Courier mail suite for a company that hosted emails for lots of local businesses. I wrote a few small programs to simplify domain and use management, and it was really a pleasure to use (http://products.jgaa.com/?menu=566).

  11. Re:Hope they look close & rule out GMail... by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

    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.

    --
    When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
  12. Monoculture by manu0601 · · Score: 2

    With many institutions moving to MS and Google cloud mail service, it seems we head toward a dangerous monoculture, or duoculture, at least.

  13. Re:Hope they look close & rule out GMail... by OrangeTide · · Score: 1

    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.

    --
    “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
  14. E-mail is essentially a legacy system... by slk · · Score: 1

    And for most people, it means either GMail or Exchange. They both have their trade-offs, but they both get the job done. Open source e-mail software still has a place on the back-end, but it's incapable of providing the sort of collaboration platform people expect (for good reasons) in 2017.

    --
    ERROR: Null .sig, core dumped.
  15. Not quite dead yet by Mostly+a+lurker · · Score: 4, 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!!

  16. Don't tell my client by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    my achy breaky client

    I just don't think he'd understand

  17. Re:Hope they look close & rule out GMail... by Dog-Cow · · Score: 1

    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.

  18. Exchange IMAP by nyet · · Score: 2

    Exchange IMAP performance is atrocious, not to mention completely broken from a standards point of view.

    1. Re:Exchange IMAP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      This is probably by design. Microsoft hates mail. Actually they hate standard-compliant everything.

    2. Re:Exchange IMAP by nyet · · Score: 1

      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.

    3. Re:Exchange IMAP by michael_wojcik · · Score: 1

      Yes, but Exchange everything is atrocious, so users quickly become accustomed to it.

      Exchange: Managing user expectations since 1993.

  19. Re:Hope they look close & rule out GMail... by Heliologue · · Score: 1

    No, he pointed out a number of reasons why people might not prefer GMail's interface. The fact that it's an extraordinarily popular service would seem to indicate that there are plenty of people who _do_ like it. There's no objective points to argue about.

  20. Re:Hope they look close & rule out GMail... by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

    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.

    --
    When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
  21. Re:Hope they look close & rule out GMail... by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

    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.

    --
    When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
  22. Re:It's complicated. by Cramer · · Score: 1

    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.