[Dovecot] Dovecot suggestions for new installation

[Michael Durket]

I've been testing Dovecot for a while now and am preparing to replace  
our outdated IMAP
system with it. The current system serves about 300 email users who  
run a mixture of
clients (Eudora, Apple Mail, Thunderbird and Outlook). Can any of the  
many experts on
this list answer a few questions:

     1) What's the latest stable release of Dovecot I should be  
running on this new system
          (Dovecot will be running on a RedHat Linux AS 4 64 bit  
system with plenty of memory
          and CPU). I've been running 1.13 on my test system but I see  
that 1.18 just came
          out (although I don't know if I should switch to it  
immediately.

     2)  What configuration file options (if any) should I turn on to  
best handle the range of
           email clients listed above?

     3)  Are there any "sizing" options I need to worry about setting  
for the number of
           email users I have (I suspect that 300 users is considered  
a rather small
          mail system but I want to minimize its resource usage as  
much as possible
          while still giving decent performance from Dovecot).

    And, just out of curiosity, I'm looking into the idea of switching  
users from mbox format
over to Maildir format on this system (it will use all locally- 
connected disks and have no
NFS mounts). Does the Dovecot automatic migration program to migrate  
from mbox
to Maildir work well or are there "gotchas"?

    Thanks.