Re: Two questions on setting up an imap daemon for my home LAN
<quote who="Neal Lippman">
> Question 1: Which imap server makes the most sense to use? I was leaning
> towards cyrus-imap for two reasons: it doesn't appear to require that I
> also install a separate MTA, such as exim,
if you want to send mail you'll need a MTA, cyrus does not handle sending
mail it is only pop3/imap4. I use cyrus exclusivly on half a dozen servers
and am very happy with it sofar.
> don't need them), and secondly it appears that cyrus-imap can accept
> incoming mail via LMTP on a unix-domain socket.
if your using debian's cyrus check to be sure it supports this, debian's
cyrus is several years old, last i checked even the version in unstable
is the same one that's in stable and as far as i know does not support
lmtp. or at least i have seen no mention of lmtp in my dealings with
cyrus 1.5 over the past couple years.
> and then forward it via LMTP to cyrus-imap would be a good way to set
> things up. Does this make sense? Is there a better solution I should be
> using?
if it was me i would just run a MTA and recieve mail locally. fetchmail
has had some bugs in the past where it hangs on certain messages,
or it dies for unknown reaons. it has it's purpose, but i would just
run a MTA. unless your on a modem or dynamic ip or your isp doesn't
allow servers.
>
> Question 2: I use KMail as my email client, and I'm pretty satisfied with
> it. However, KMail stores all of its mail folders in mbox format in
> ~/Mail. As far as I understand things, cyrus-imap also stores each users
> mail folders in ~/Mail, I think in maildir format. Since my server
debian's cyrus stores mail in /var/spool/cyrus/mail/user/MAILBOX
where MAILBOX is the account name.it is not readable by users, only
accessable through the cyrus daemons. they do it this way so they
can have(i think) special locking which allows multiple logins to the
same account without problems. it uses it's own mailbox storage format
as far as i know..
> exports its entire /home tree via nfs, and on each workstation that nfs
> export is used to provide the /home directory for the logged in user, I
> am unclear as to how KMail and cyrus-imapd would be able to share that
> common directory for mail files. Is there a way to redirect where
i think the cyrus docs strongly urged against storing cyrus files on
a nfs volume for locking issues. been a while though.
> cyrus-imapd stores each users mail? Or, since once I have this up and
> running I will store all the mail on in the IMAP folders anyway, so
> KMail in theory won't need its own folders, is that not going to be a
> problem?
unless the newer cyrus is different, you can change where the mail
is stored but the users will not have access to it in the manor you
describe as it is not owned by them and they have no read access.
I would be suprised if any mail client out-of-the-box could open
cyrus mail files cleanly.
one of cyrus's advantages is the indexes it maintains, mailbox access
is lightning fast and not resource intensive, even if you could access
the mail directly through kmail this advantage would be lost.
debian's cyrus(i say this because i have not used any others), depends
completely upon using the daemons to interact with the mail, mail
folders are kept track of in /var/lib/cyrus/mailboxes (i think ..off
the top of my head), if you just create a new folder, cyrus will not
recognize it unless you rebuild the mailboxes file via the rebuild
command? and of course the permissions have to be right in order for
it to work.
if what your asking is what you want to do, i think cyrus is not
the mail server you want to use.
but i still love it
nate
(writing this from my cyrus/postfix/squirrelmail server)
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