On Sat, Dec 27, 2003 at 10:10:06PM -0600, Will Trillich wrote: > so we're looking for advice -- as subjective or as objective as > you can make it -- on implementing an imap email server. we've > seen the hype for courier and for cyrus; to proceed > intelligently, we'd like some real-life feedback from folks > who've used them. I have experience with uw-imap and courier-imap. uw-imap stores mail in unix mbox files. This really hurts its performance. Especially with large mailboxes (folders). And it also means that a folder with messages in it can't have subfolders. Therefore it is a terrible choice unless you *need* mail to be stored in mbox files. Courier on the other hand stores mail in Maildir folders. This is nice because it gives better performance and allows mail to be delivered even when the mailbox (folder) is in use (no locking). It also allows subfolders in folders with messages. However by default it stores the user's mail in the folder Maildir in their home directory. The advantage with both these systems is that if users have local accounts then they can use mutt, pine, evolution, and so on, to read their mail. It also means that you can use ready made scripts and programs that deal with mail in mbox or Maildir format. I believe courier uses its own format, which is similar to Maildir. But it doesn't store mail in the user's home directory. In fact it bypasses user accounts entirely. I think it should be possible to setup courier to work in this way, but I'm not 100% sure about that. > we'll probably also be looking to deliver a webmail interface > (squirrelmail? courier? sqwebmail?) as well. I've pretty much tried them all. I think they're all ok. squirrelmail is probably the best. But they all end up sucking if you have too much email, but that's a problem with webmail and not the particular implementations. Bijan -- Bijan Soleymani <bijan@psq.com> http://www.crasseux.com
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