
Decommission of Cyrus Email - Jerry2
https://www.cmu.edu/computing/email/cyrus/project/index.html
======
brongondwana
Cyrus development will not be affected by this. While CMU has been running
Cyrus, and employing one of the key developers, FastMail has a team dedicated
to supporting the biggest open source project that we use. We have a new
developer starting on Wednesday next week as well as Ken from CMU who has
agreed to keep working on Cyrus as a FastMail employee and representing the
project at conferences.

We are committed to improving the project and keeping it open. As a member of
the Cyrus IMAP board, I'm very proud of the 3.0 release that we recently made,
and we're currently planning for the 3.1 release which will include further
significant improvements.

~~~
SwellJoe
That's great news. We've been considering migrating to Cyrus instead of
Dovecot in Virtualmin default installs, as Cyrus seems much closer to JMAP
support and we're planning a rebuild of our webmail to use JMAP.

I often worry about infrastructure projects like IMAP, SMTP, DNS, SSH,
OpenSSL, etc. They often have very small teams, mostly volunteers, and the
implications of a bug, particularly a security bug, can be catastrophic. And,
if something we rely on were to be abandoned, we'd probably be screwed; even
in cases where we have the technical ability in-house to maintain another
major project, we don't have the time (or the budget to add more people to our
small team).

~~~
brongondwana
This worry is why we try to keep in-house expertise for our key tools. That's
what got me hacking on Cyrus about 8 years ago to fix some problems we had -
and look at us now!

------
a2tech
The university that I work at switched over to Gmail and its been a big step
back in terms of user experience. We canned a small team of dedicated
professionals that delivered a rock solid experience for a 'free' option from
Google. And since its IMAP implementation is half-assed at best and their web
product is also super difficult for older people (and don't even get me
started on disabled users-Gmail is completely inaccessible for them) our
support requests have skyrocketed and we've got people constantly whining. So
we've replaced 5 guys with a data mining product and support costs that would
easily cover their salaries. A real net gain.

~~~
sitharus
I switch my family email from google apps to fastmail because I got sick of
the support calls every time google changed the UI, which seemed to be
monthly. Fastmail has been rock solid and lives up to its name.

The spam filtering isn't as good, but Google's false positive rate is
atrocious

~~~
incompatible
Fastmail isn't free anymore though, it's $30 or more per year.

~~~
toast0
Fastmail is focused on providing a good mail experience, which is worth paying
for.

~~~
brongondwana
[https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/13/fastmails-
values/](https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/13/fastmails-values/) we're really
unashamed about charging money.

It means we don't have to spend time working out how to trick you out of
money, or convince somebody else to give us money in order to hire our staff.
I did an all-staff presentation last week at our quarterly meeting - by far
the majority of the money coming from our customers goes directly to paying
our staff. Hiring good people costs money, and running a good system requires
good people!

------
colechristensen
It's really disappointing that nothing better than gmail has come along.

There _are_ open source alternatives, but they aren't as good, that's all
there is to it. Setting up a mail server is hard, not because it needs to be
but because the software requires eldritch incantations to make it work
properly (there are too many things to keep track of in order to A) get email
delivered at all and B) not become a spam relay)

It's possible to be something in between the "Just Works" walled garden that
gives you no options or control and the archaic wizardry which requires a 2
foot grey beard to understand.

~~~
paulddraper
For me, the killer feature of Gmail that's hard to compete with is spam
filtering.

I remember when people thought spam was single handedly going to make email
unusable.

~~~
Tharkun
On the other side of that, sending mail to gmail can be rather challenging.
They have a tendency of 541-ing mails for no apparent reason, under the
pretense of "poor mail server reputation".

Basically you don't control who gets to send you mails. You're entirely at
Google's uncompromising and unreachable mercy.

~~~
colechristensen
If you run DKIM, SPF, and DMARC, you shouldn't have any delivery problems.

DKIM is signing your email with the public key in DNS.

SPF is whitelisting which mail servers send mail from your domain

DMARC is how receiving ends should report how your mail is delivered (or not).

Unless you're actively spamming (ahem, "marketing") to large volumes of users,
you should have no trouble at all getting mail delivered to users.

If you are doing mass email marketing, stick with your core competence and let
someone else handle the mail servers.

~~~
interfixus
You _shouldn 't_ have any problems. But you do.

After fifteen years running my own mail systems, I have finally given up. Ever
more outgoing mail was getting lost, despite everything being up to date and
done by the book. The arch villains, over and over, were Gmail and the MS
thing - Hotmail, outlook.com, Live, whatever they call it.

~~~
techsupporter
> After fifteen years running my own mail systems, I have finally given up.

Same here. I've been hosting my own e-mail for two decades (as of this year)
and I gave up earlier this year. My spouse's e-mail to friends who use GMail--
something like 80% of them--would, every couple of months, disappear into the
recipient's spam folder or sometimes just disappear entirely. My logs would
show a successful delivery but the recipient couldn't find the message
anywhere. Occasionally messages would start going into junk _in the middle of
a conversation_.

Nothing I changed would permanently fix it. I'd send from a different IP in my
block (something.something.194 instead of something.something.193) and mail
would flow again...for a couple of months and then stop. My domain
registration predates Google's existence by 18 months. I've been sending from
the same IP subnet for six years. My colo provider is actually so small that
I'm the only customer left on my "neighborhood" /24 (they've recently asked me
if I want the entire block routed to me for the lulz). I have SPF, DKIM, and
DMARC all set up and they've not changed for at least two years. The amount of
mail outbound from my server is (was?) so little that I could tail the
outbound mail log and keep up with each message being sent.

None of that mattered. I even signed up for Google's Postmaster Tools but, and
this really cooked my goose, I send _so little e-mail_ that I don't qualify to
show up on their reports. I tried contacting Google but
hahahahahahahahahahahaha--wheeze--hahahahahahahaha.

No other recipient had a problem with me. Messages were successfully delivered
to Microsoft and Yahoo just fine. Only Google had a problem with my e-mail.

I finally caved. Google has SO MUCH of the e-mail market that unreachability
to them is a catastrophe...and they know it. I don't have the leverage to make
them play nice.

Thankfully, Fastmail does so I've changed to them. For the first time since
February 1997 my MX doesn't point to my own server and that makes me a little
sad.

~~~
interfixus
My experience _exactly_ , though I didn't bother to spell it out in detail.
Also the final move to Fastmail, who, it must be said, serves me nicely and
well.

~~~
techsupporter
Yep, if it weren't for Fastmail I'd still be hosting my own e-mail and just
quietly cursing the existence of Gmail. Now I get to have high significant
other acceptance factor _and_ curse the existence of Gmail.

------
Tharkun
Ah yes. Just what the world needs: more organizations throwing their data over
the fence at Google's walled garden.

We might as well decomission decentralized e-mail and move everyone on to
GMail and FB Messenger.

Sigh.

~~~
a2tech
Yup. Computers and the open Internet that we grew up with/believed in is being
trashed for 'free' products.

------
0x0
The big story here is that CMU appears to be the actual developers and
maintainers of the Cyrus IMAP mail software, no?

~~~
brongondwana
CMU still employs one of the Cyrus IMAP developers for now, but FastMail has
been sponsoring the bulk of the development work for a while.

We (the Cyrus IMAP board -
[https://www.cyrusimap.org/overview/cyrus_bylaws.html](https://www.cyrusimap.org/overview/cyrus_bylaws.html))
are looking for a new home for the project which is independent of any one
single company. I'd hoped to have more news to post before this was made quite
so public!

~~~
teddyh
Might I suggest the Software Freedom Conservancy?
([https://sfconservancy.org/projects/apply/](https://sfconservancy.org/projects/apply/))

~~~
brongondwana
Thanks, they're one of our top two contenders for a new home :) I was going to
contact them last week, but the week became a bit busy because we had overseas
staff in the office and wanted to use the time with them for face-to-face
tasks.

------
minimaxir
As a CMU alum, the benefits of Gmail outweigh the sheer _frustration_ using
the SquirrelMail web client in the public computer clusters.

~~~
hueving
>the benefits of Gmail outweigh the sheer frustration using the SquirrelMail
web

This sentence doesn't really make sense. When comparing two things an
advantage of one thing doesn't "outweigh" a disadvantage of another. Those are
both negatives for the second thing.

~~~
Ensorceled
So you actually didn't understand what was meant by the sentence?

~~~
hueving
No, because it implies there is a tradeoff but doesn't highlight what that
tradeoff is.

------
hueving
This is sad, Red Hat switching to Gmail was probably the most shocking to me
since it's supposed to be a company pushing open source forward.

~~~
mgbmtl
Do you have any reference about that? I could not tell just by looking at
their MX record, and the subject is difficult to google.

------
dboreham
Amazing how long some code lasts. Fond memories of working once in a while
with John Gardiner Myers in the 90s.

~~~
leg
Yeah, John is great. His Unicode handling in Cyrus was way ahead of it's time.

I left CMU & the project 14 years ago. It's nice to know that some code lives
on.

------
shirro
Perhaps they should have tried Dovecot.

~~~
creeble
Indeed, one surprise here is that Cyrus is still around.

Sad that gmail now owns ~50% of all email now though.

(I made that number up. Anyone have any idea how close it may be?)

~~~
duskwuff
For personal email addresses in the US, my experience would put that number
closer to 80%. In some audiences, it'll be even higher.

~~~
nocman
And even for the people who have non-Gmail accounts, Google has made deals
with a ton of ISPs to host their email service for them -- so you have a Gmail
account even if don't have a Gmail account (in a manner of speaking).

~~~
tinus_hn
Do people still use ISP email addresses?

~~~
nocman
Yes people do. I know a lot of people don't, but there are still a lot of
people who do.

------
Faaak
What we need is a complete open source "work email" solution: email, calendar,
tasks, address book. I have to say that exchange is very good at that, but its
not open source. I would pay, and it would be wonderful, if an open source
project similar to exchange gave birth.

~~~
codefined
I've been trying to create a complete open source solution to this exact
problem, although I've only been working on it for a month and so far have
only semi-complete the email part of it. You can see the current iteration of
it here:

[https://github.com/femto-email/client](https://github.com/femto-email/client)

------
bitmapbrother
As expected, the Fastmail pitchmen are out in full force anytime the word
email is in the topic.

As the article stated they have a choice of Gmail or Exchange.

~~~
brongondwana
Yeah, I got tagged in to talk about Cyrus, as one of the Cyrus IMAP Board. But
of course I'll talk about FastMail too, since we do most of the work on Cyrus
these days.

------
stefantalpalaru
Brought to you by the people who attacked Tor for the feds:
[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/carnegie-
mellon-u...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/carnegie-mellon-
university-attacked-tor-was-subpoenaed-by-feds)

