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Electronic mail is a major infrastructure service of most organizations. At Carnegie Mellon the use of electronic mail has overshadowed the use of all other distributed services since the early 1990s. At that time, the Andrew Mail and Bulletin Board System (AMS) was a universally available service, and departments without AMS ran their own mail systems. AMS has since been deprecated, and Project Cyrus is now the campus-wide mail system.
Cyrus is a highly scalable enterprise mail system designed for use in enterprise environments of various sizes using standards based technologies. Cyrus technologies scale from independent use in email departments to a system centrally managed in a large enterprise.
There is non-CMU effort to develop Cyrus utilities.
The Cyrus IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) server provides access to personal mail and system-wide bulletin boards through the IMAP protocol. The Cyrus IMAP server is a scalable enterprise mail system designed for use from small to large enterprise environments using standards-based technologies.
A full Cyrus IMAP implementation allows a seamless mail and bulletin board environment to be set up across multiple servers. It differs from other IMAP server implementations in that it is run on "sealed" servers, where users are not normally permitted to log in. The mailbox database is stored in parts of the filesystem that are private to the Cyrus IMAP system. All user access to mail is through software using the IMAP, POP3, or KPOP protocols.
The private mailbox database design gives the server large advantages in efficiency, scalability, and administratability. Multiple concurrent read/write connections to the same mailbox are permitted. The server supports access control lists on mailboxes and storage quotas on mailbox hierarchies.
For more information about IMAP:
The core technology used by Project Cyrus is the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP4). IMAP4 specifies a network protocol for accessing a remote message store from a client application. It is an Internet Proposed Standard (RFC 1730), and it is quickly gaining acceptance as the Internet standard for mail store access. Many major universities are basing their future distributed mail solutions on IMAP4. The previous versions of IMAP, IMAP2 and IMAP2bis are backward compatible with IMAP4 and are already in widespread use. There are already clients in existence on every major platform and many more in the works.
IMAP4 is an improvement over other popular Internet mail protocols when it comes to scale and availability. The Post Office Protocol (POP) family, and similar protocols, are less useful to a student-heavy user base, as they are designed to act primarily as store and forward engines. Clients contact a remote message store and download all their mail to a local message store. When the messages have been downloaded from the remote message store to the client, mobility becomes a real problem: The downloaded messages are no longer easily accessible from other clients. Even more importantly, many of the clients that students use have no permanent storage for their use, necessitating use of a remote filesystem for storage, which leads to problems with access and scale.
IMAP4 is a super-set of the functionality provided by POP3--that is, all the functionality of a POP3 client can be mimicked using the IMAP4 protocol. The IMAP4 revision of the IMAP protocol adds support for disconnected operation. This will allow for a client on a notebook computer to download portions of a mail store and keep them syncrhonized with the mail store over time.
One of the goals of Project Cyrus is to support the MIME internet standard message interchange format. IMAP4 has rich support for MIME, allowing the MIME structure to be examined without downloading the whole message to the client and for individual MIME parts to be downloaded. For example, if a MIME messages includes a 5meg audio portion and your client does not support audio, IMAP4 will allow all of the message to be downloaded with the exception of that MIME part. This is also important functionality for disconnected and slow link operation.
IMAP4 does not provide all the functionality necessary to achieve the goals of accessing remote messages from multiple clients. There is no mechanism for storing and retreiving client- and user-specific information. When users move between clients, or when they move between machines while using the same client, it is important that their profile information follow them. Address books, folders, and bboards all need to be accessible--users need a reliable mechanism to find what server houses these subscriptions and data. This is especially true in a large environment where administrators may wish to move users and bboards between mail servers in order to optimize performance and disk space.
Putting the missing functionality into IMAP4 would bloat the protocol with functions that are not needed when accessing a remote message store. A sister protocol to IMAP4 has been created to provide this missing functionality. This protocol, the Internet Message Support Protocol (IMSP), has a central store of client and user option information, address book storage and access, and, finally, a way to find folders and check their status from a central location.
IMSP is very similar in structure and convention to IMAP4. This simplifies the implementation of clients which support both IMAP4 and IMSP. IMSP establishes a convention for naming options so that options common to multiple clients can have a reliable name. It keeps different clients from stomping on each other's personal namespace.
It is IMSP which really adds to functions necessary for scaling. In order to ensure that the IMSP does not become a bottleneck or single point of failure, provisions have been made in the protocol to replicate the IMSP server.
The Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP) is the Internet standard for tranporting mail. It is widely implemented and must be used by anyone who wants to communicate with the Internet community. SMTP is used solely for delivery of mail. It is not intended for dilail servers, gateways, and clients deliver mail to mail stores and gateways. SMTP is not intended for delivery of mail directly to clients. In addtion, it is not wise to have clients deliver mail to the final destination in all cases. Often mail can not be delivered to the destination because of bad network connections, temporary machine downtime, or load problems at either end. In these cases the SMTP delivery agent must requeue the mail and try again later. Since mail clients can be office machines which are not gaurunteed to remain on or operational, it is not optimal for them to be delivering directly to remote destinations. To solve this, most mail clients deliver mail to post office machines which will deliver the mail on their behalf. Other reasons for this include better name resolution and error handling.
Project Cyrus uses SMTP as the protocol for mail transport. For internal use between Cyrus clients and Cyrus post office machines, Kerberos extensions have been added to SMTP to allow for better guarantees of the originator of the message. Some time in the future, the Kerberos extentions may be replaced or augmented by some form of Privacy Enhanced Mail (PEM), but that is not in the original scope of Project Cyrus.