Re: IMAP recommendations
On Thu, 12 Dec 2002, Paul Tansom wrote:
> Exim base mail app. - I wavered on Qmail, but really didn't like it
> much, partly due to the license obstructing binary distribution and
> partly due to the configuration - the way it uses multiple hidden files
> for managing aliases is a pain and just plain daft imho.
Qmail? Yuck, if you like something in qmail, try postfix instead... at least
it is djb-free, and DFSG-compliant.
> Courier for IMAP - I looked briefly at UW, but this didn't seem to solid
> on the security side from what I read; I also looked at Cygnus and
UW-imap is a... horrible side-effect of bovines eating a lot of grass.
Courier is pretty decent, and IMHO the only other possible choice other than
Cyrus 2.1. Courier plays loose with the IMAP RFCs, though. While Cyrus is
anal-retentive on being thruly RFC-compliant. On the other hand, Cyrus uses
SASL (which means it can be a REAL pain to configure correctly).
Cyrus can handle a few hundred thousand users in a single badass box, I
don't think Courier can do that. Cyrus can cluster with a _flat_ mailbox
namespace, too. And it comes with a full set of proxies (lmtp, imap, pop3
and sieve proxies) if you need them.
Virtual domains using something like "user@domain.com" is NOT
straightforward to setup with Cyrus 2.1, though. You need that? Go for
Courier, IMHO.
Cyrus 2.2 fixes the virtual domains, but it is alpha and not stable enough
yet. OTOH, it allows you to access your email using a news reader(!) or to
access your news using a mail client (yuck! :^P)...
> locally on the server using Mutt if I need to - too proprietry for me,
> if that's the right word!
Well, just mutt -f '{foo@localhost}' :-) And the Cyrus spool format is
quite well documented, thank you very much. It's just that you are
DEFINATELY not supposed to access it directly, ever, so nobody does :-)
(It looks like a MH spool, and you HAVE direct access to all the emails,
with all headers, one per file. Quite easy to process directly if you
really need to. But you will have to cyrreconstruct the indexes after
meddling with the spool...)
--
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
Henrique Holschuh
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