I'm writing my thesis and part of it includes some comparison between different mail servers.

Now I'm looking for some most popular linux mailservers so I could decide what programs to include. I've been thinking about Dovecot, Cyrus and Courier because I've used all of them in the past and used Dovecot in this project.

Is there some survey where to get idea what servers are popular ones, like this survey for MX?

You mean plugging something like "Linux mail server comparison" into your favorite search engine didn't yield any usable results?..

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Ofcourse I did search but I found mostly just comparison about features, not market shares. Maybe I should try again in case I missed something...

What would you like to know?

It is anecdotal evidence, but it seems that Postfix is the predominant mail server (SMTP) in use. Others include Sendmail and Qmail. The two most common POP/IMAP servers are probably Dovecot and Courier. I personally use Dovecot and it seems to be easier to configure. The other two mail systems that I have seen references with any sort of regularity include Zimbra and Citadel.

Just an opinion, but I think it depends on the mailservers owner. Type into google mail server linux tutorial or whatever and you mostly get dovecot and postfix setup. So for someone who just wants an easy mailserver for a small website they will be far more likely to use the above. This is actually why I use postfix/dovecot. For more serious mailservers, people would be far more likely to weigh up the comparisons between sendmail, postfix, exchange etc and chose the one that suits their requirements better. So there may be more postfix/dovecot servers in use, but perhaps a higher volume of mail is going through non dovecot/postfix servers.

Does this make sense? It's 3:30am!

10 servers use dovecot/postfix and recieve 10 emails per day through their servers
1 server uses exchange and recieves 100,000 emails per day


for example

Thanks for answers.
I had MTA portion sorted out earlier so no need to get more information on those.

And I do know that Dovecot is really easy to set up and configuring Cyrus can make you cry. I've had my share with Courier, too so I'm somewhat familiar with all of those and their features.

All I wanted to know is which is used most so I could write something about that and think about reasons why others have chosen their server. I've found those charts for MTAs but not for IMAP/POP servers, and that was what I was looking for initially, don't need really any other info about those servers. Just what are the 3 or 5 most popular ones.