2002-10-01-04:16:25 Andrew Richards:
I wrote to highlight qmail - "The original and best" mailserver to use Maildirs. Qmail is a particularly strong mailserver implementation and is very stable - I have some concerns with Courier mentioned by Bennett in that a new version seems to appear frequently.
I followup only to mention that my choice of Courier applies only to the IMAP (and POP) daemons (the Courier-IMAP package), and the maildrop Local Delivery Agent, which work together to support a very nice virtual user architecture around /etc/userdb.
For MTA, qmail is definitely one of my top two choices. I personally prefer to use Postfix, but when making recommendations to others I try to just advise them to use one or the other of those two, whichever they like best.
This is wandering off-topic for the toasters list, I'm afraid; if anyone wants to discuss MTA choices more, do please feel free to drop me a note off-list. What can be said here with relevance is that there are some of us who adore using NetApps as the heart of big mail farms with Maildirs as the enabling data structure. If I'm remembering aright, there was a tasty paper a few years back about some large ISP (Earthlink, maybe?) who took this approach and came away happy.
-Bennett