G'day All,

With the Dovecot 2.3->2.4 change up ahead, I'm looking for a recommendation.

We use Exim as our main mail server. I understand it, I can work with it and it has been our main mailserver since Debian moved from Sendmail to Exim many, many moons ago (I forget, but decades). It works and unless someone presents a really great case I'll probably stick with it. For client access we initially used Courier IMAP. I don't remember when or why (because it would be at least 20 years ago) we migrated to Dovecot. Since then it has "just worked".

We use IMAP only. When I say "we", there are 5 mailboxes plus a couple of archives. Every couple of months we prune the mailboxes into the archive boxes using imapsync.

On the business side we run Zimbra (in an ubuntu VM). Initially it was the Blackberry integration (in an XP VM) that really sold us, but as that fell away the MAPI for the holdout Outlook users and ActiveSync are features we'd struggle to live without. One thing Zimbra does awesomely is "full text search". Doesn't matter the format, if I put a purchase order number into the search box "Z12345pfe", Zimbra will return the E-mails with the correct references, even if they're in a PDF and 12 years old.

I'd *really* like to implement this for my (personal) IMAP stuff. Currently Thunderbird does mail body searches which take forever and don't touch the attachments.

So what I'm after is recommendations for an IMAP back end that can accommodate something like Apache Tika and index all E-mails including attachments.

I believe the "free" Dovecot can use Apache Solr, which can then be configured to use Tika to index attachments, but before I spend days staging it out I thought I'd ask to see if there was any experience with something like this?

Mail is currently stored in Dovecot Maildir format, but I could cope with a IMAPsync migration if that was required. I have a pathological hatred of mbox, particularly when one of the accounts is subscribed to linux-kernel.

Does anyone have a suggestion?

To be minorly on-topic, a Daedelus to Excalibur migration on the staging machine needed config changes in bind9, dnsmasq and dovecot. The rest was relatively painless. The Beowulf to Daedelus migration was a bit bumpier.

Regards,
Brad