History
Prior to 1994, Carnegie Mellon University exclusively used the locally-developed and non-standard Andrew Messaging System (AMS) for its email communication needs. Originally written in the early 1980s as part of the Andrew Project, it was very advanced for its day. However, it had major scalability issues. Carnegie Mellon wanted to move to a standards-compliant mail system that met or exceeded the feature set of AMS, and with an emphasis on disconnected operation and scalability (scalability both in simultaneous online accesses and in large mailboxes).
In 1994 the Computing Services Division at Carnegie Mellon addressed these goals by starting the Cyrus Project. In 1998 (class of 2002), Carnegie Mellon placed all of its incoming freshmen on the Cyrus server for the first time. In December 2001, bboard access (which had been mirrored from AMS to Cyrus), cut over to Cyrus completely. AMS was finally phased out in May 2002.
As development on the project progressed, it became clear that users required further scalability and additional reliability beyond that which a single-machine configuration could provide. In response the Computing Services Division developed Cyrus "Murder" clustering, and after several revisions deployed it within Carnegie Mellon in the summer of 2002.
Read more about this topic: Cyrus IMAP Server
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