Re: Building an IMAP server
Hans Wilmer said:
> Well, I'd like to use LDAP to have a global address book for users, as a
> first step. If I only could get it to work, LDAP could be used to
> authenticate mail-users.
>
> But lacking something else, I would set up users with adduser, though not
> create home directories and have /bin/false as their shell. This would
> result in plain text authentication, which is not exactly
> secure.
use IMAPS then.(IMAP over ssl). sslwrap can provide this functionality
to any IMAP server. I personally prefer plain text auth, makes things
simplier, but of course that means using some sort of lower layer encryption
like SSL or VPN to secure the link.
> Does SASL use LDAP?
Openldap can use sasl(not required, I build my openldap debs w/o
sasl), but it currently uses the "older" sasl, which is different from
the one included with cyrus 2.
> The server will need some RAID setup to have the data mirrored, either
> software RAID or hardware RAID. Unfortunately, it will have IDE discs to
> provide sufficent storage capacity at reasonable costs. My idea is to
> eventually use a fast SCSI disk to put the more actively used mail folders
> on it and to create an archives.* hierarchy on the IDE
> disc. Users will be forced to move their older mail to their folders under
> archives.* by setting quotas accordingly. Thanks to cyrus, this can be set
> up transparently.
only drawback is cyrus has no quota notification so you need to write
some sort of script if you want to be notified. squirrelmail has a quota
plugin which works with cyrus, it shows a % as well as MB/kb used/avail
on the left frame of the app. I wrote a really ugly script last year
to provide this, it ran daily, I think if the user exceeded 80% of their
quota(200MB) they would get emailed once a week, if they reached 95% they
would get emailed daily. it worked well, the script is so ugly I don't
want to share it though :) not even sure I still have it, could probably
make it in perl in 1/10th the amount of code it took me to do it in
bash. I gave myself 75% less storage then the rest of the users to
set an example for not storing crap on the mail servers. When I initially
implimented the quota system some users had more then 700MB of mail. Most
were happy to delete enough(or move it) so they could get under the 200MB
limit.
and of course any other mail clients that could detect IMAP quota worked
too, though ATM I'm not aware of any off the top of my head that support
this.
nate
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