Apple’s upcoming release of OS X “Snow Leopard” has performance enhancements across the board for desktop users. Snow Leopard promises a more complete transition to 64 bit plus the ability to use graphics chips for traditional CPU operations. However, the server version of Snow Leopard also looks to provide huge performance gains and optimizations. Email, that basic service that every real server needs to offer, gets a huge leg up in Snow Leopard courtesy of a little open source project called Dovecot.
First released in 2002 by Timo Sirainen, a Finnish developer, Dovecot has slowly and silently improved email server performance on Unix and GNU/Linux systems. Savvy systems administrators started using Dovecot in place of traditional Unix email services to improve IMAP connectivity. While Dovecot can use the traditional “mbox” style of email storage, where each mailbox stores all messages in a single file, it shines when combined with the “Maildir” or “dbox” storage format, the latter being a Dovecot-only format.
“Maildir” and “dbox” allow for individual messages to reside in their own respective files. In a “Maildir” system, every message always has its own file. In a “dbox” system, Dovecot can intelligently allocate one or more messages to a respective file. This allows the email server to work with very large mailboxes, but without loading giant mailbox files into memory and then constantly stepping through them. Dovecot uses a high-performance index system to store and retrieve messages quickly. The results speak for themselves. Dovecot is fast. I’ve used it on servers for the past 2 years and going to Dovecot with “Maildir” storage increased email performance instantly. In addition, Dovecot’s compatibility with a lot of other email processing and filtering systems makes it ready for prime time.
By making Dovecot its default email service, Apple has once again innovated by utilizing great open source projects and integrating them into OS X. I can’t wait to see what else lands in the final version of OS X Snow Leopard server.
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March 4th, 2009 at 6:17 am
[…] abound that Snow Leopard’s Mail server will use Dovecot instead of Cyrus. This is excellent news. According to the Dovecot project’s web site, the […]
May 23rd, 2009 at 9:17 pm
How do you know with certainty that Dovecot will be used in Snow Leopard Server?
May 26th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
@ eddie
its true and its awesome
June 13th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
[…] It seems like Dovecot has become the better IMAP server, here is a comparison chart. From what I’ve read on the web Dovecot is more secure, faster and more IMAP compliant then any other server out there. Now the full details are available on Snow Leopard Server you will read that Dovecot is going to be the standard implementation. Here are some related news items that had spilled the news earlier: AppleInsider and Derek Underwood’s blog. […]
March 10th, 2010 at 7:14 pm
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