The Courier IMAP server

Lindsay Haisley | 11 May 2012 21:37

Courier "market share"

I went looking for some statistics on how Courier-MTA stacks up against
other MTA packages - something similar to Netcraft's web server survey.
I found nada.  I did find one page at
<http://shearer.org/MTA_Comparison> implying that Courier-MTA isn't
really a MTA at all, although this was from 2007.

Qmail still seems to be popular, in spite of its lack of modernization
and developer support, and its quirky license.  Courier, which is
well-maintained and supported, GPL licensed, and appears to have a wide
international user base, is seldom mentioned at all.

Does anyone have any stats, or reference to recent surveys, with some
figures?

I've been trying forever to get the Mailman list server developers
(<http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman>) to include a courier-to-mailman
list insertion script for courier which I wrote _years_ ago.  It finally
made it to the contrib collection (along with qmail-to-mailman) but
unlike the qmail script it has never been properly integrated into
configure.in so as to be properly installed by the build scripts.  I
don't think many of the Mailman devs have even heard of Courier-MTA,
although Courier-IMAP seems to be reasonably popular.

--

-- 
Lindsay Haisley       | "Fighting against human creativity is like 
FMP Computer Services |   trying to eradicate dandelions"
512-259-1190          |
http://www.fmp.com    |       -- Pamela Jones

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Alessandro Vesely | 12 May 2012 11:14

Re: Courier "market share"

On Sat 12/May/2012 10:18:35 +0200 Lindsay Haisley wrote:
> 
> Does anyone have any stats, or reference to recent surveys, with some
> figures?

For a very very very skewed survey, since Courier is one of the MTA
packages that support SPF, its share among those who enable
reject-on-fail at the MAIL command (which excludes postfix, for
example) can be inferred from the attached file (5th to 8th place, I'd
say.)

I drew two random ~30K-entries samples from a bunch of ~250K domain
names, and found that reject-on-fail can be detected in some 1.2% of
cases by this method (which is part of why the test is so skewed for
your purpose.)

I'd bet Sam did explain why Courier doesn't start sessions with an
identifiable greeting text, but am unable to quickly find any pointer.

--

--

mysql> select mail_code, count(*) AS c, reply_mail from survey where result='R-ON-FAIL' group by
mail_code, reply_mail order by c desc limit 10;
+-----------+----+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| mail_code | c  | reply_mail                                                                                                                                                                                                |
+-----------+----+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|       550 | 48 | 5.7.1 Sender-Id/SPF check failed: not permitted in "MAIL FROM:<postmaster <at> spf-all.com>"                                                                                                                   |
|       550 | 44 | 5.7.1 Client host rejected: Please see
http://spf.pobox.com/why.html?sender=postmaster%40spf-all.com&ip=62.94.243.226&receiver=                                                                           |

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Sam Varshavchik | 12 May 2012 16:20

Re: Courier "market share"

Alessandro Vesely writes:

> I'd bet Sam did explain why Courier doesn't start sessions with an
> identifiable greeting text, but am unable to quickly find any pointer.

No specific reason. Just the way the code turned out to be. But it's  
possible that <hostname> ESMTP was the standard greeting text, way back  
when, so that's what I went with.

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