The college’s considerable population consists of one thousand academic and seventeen thousand student users.

The staff mailboxes were held on a Microsoft Exchange email system, which was proving unreliable and difficult to maintain. Students had little or no access to email facilities.

The requirement was to provide a system that was (1) scalable, and (2) integrated into the college's existing network with little or no disruption. On the scalability side, it was envisaged that more features would be needed to be added to the college's email system, including secure IMAP access, mailing lists and web access.

Both open source and closed source solutions were considered.

Microsoft Exchange 2000 was the preferred closed source system. However, this solution for a population of some eighteen thousand users, would have been very expensive in terms of client access licenses, hardware and maintenance support.

Cyrus IMAP from Carnegie Melon University was the open source choice. This was chosen for its track record in stability, flexibility and scalability.