Re: Building an IMAP server
On Tue, Feb 04, 2003 at 01:37:38PM -0800, nate wrote:
> > Ok, all this sounds good. Cyrus may be the more solid solution at
> > least. But some questions come up with it:
>
> as a cyrus user on debian for 2 years now I can say that cyrus 1.5
> is a ROCK solid mail server. Extremely fast, reliable, fairly easy
> to use, flexible etc.
Well, though cyrus is a more complicated software than courier-imap
due to the more features it has, it feels more solid at least. And it
has advantages over courier that seem to make the best choice for the
proposed operating environment the server should service.
> That said, I took a look at possibly replacing my cyrus 1.5 with a
> new cyrus 2.0 or 2.1?? from the unofficial debs and it just looks
> horrible to me.
What's the better way to go when building a new server? Should I start
with 2.x or stay at 1.5?
> All this sasl crap, incompadiblities with LDAP authentication, and
> the complex install process/configure process gives it more then 3
> strikes in my book.
But how do users authenticate when they're not local users? I'm
currently stuck with LDAP; seems I can't get it to work, and I didn't
find helpful documentation yet. And SASL is another thing unknown to
me.
> So if/when I decide to move on it will be to courier.
Hm, courier is fairly easy to setup, but it's slow on larger
mailboxes. It's ok with only a few users, but nonetheless you'll
probably not be happy with it on larger mailboxes.
> > + Given that there are no local users, how do they authenticate to
> > access their email via IMAP?
>
> I use LDAP authentication via PAM. I have extensive documentation on
> how to setup & deploy such authentication at my LDAP site:
> http://howto.aphroland.de/HOWTO/LDAP
Ah, thx, I'll look into that :)
> > + What's the best way to do backups and restores?
>
> just tar up the user's mail folder(/var/spool/cyrus/mail/user/$USER).
Can exim be suspended somehow so that it keeps incoming mails in the
queue instead of delivering it during backup or recovery operations?
> particular inbox. I have done at least 3 server migrations with
> cyrus and all were totally flawless, never a single problem. The
> process isn't entirely straightforward(the above is semi complex),
> but it works, and works well.
ok
> > + The server will have to accept mail for some.domain.de and
> > some.domain.com (whereby the 'some.domain.' part is always the
> > same). All users of some.domain.de are the same users as in
> > some.domain.com, and the envelope sender and From: information will
> > always be user@some.domain.com. So far, that's easy. Can cyrus deal with
> > that?
>
> from what I understand in your question, this doesn't involve cyrus at
> all, you just tell the MTA which user to deliver the mail to, and
> cyrus takes it from there.
Sounds reasonable; I already suspected that this will be a job for
exim then.
> > all as it may be left solely to the MTA to
> > handle the different domains/groups of users.
>
> for reference, my home cyrus setup consists of a single account for
> authentication, and more then 60 other accounts which have no
Uh! What are you doing with so many accounts? Isn't it easier to have
server side filtering to direct mail into appropriate folders?
> I haven't tried courier myself yet so can't reccomend for or against
> it, I hear it's good, I plan to investigate it further, but for me
> at least cyrus 2.x is a real bad solution.
Well, I'm afraid that it won't become easy to keep up all those
accounts with only one account to authenticate with
courier. Courier-imap just runs atop ~/Maildir mailboxes. You might
need to create one user per account to get everyone to having his own
~/Maildir, and to access all the ~/Maildir's, you need to somehow
authenticate.
> if you use squirrelmail for webmail I reccomend installing php4-apc
> it improves SM performance by about 20x on my system.
Thx! Squirrelmail is one of the clients in question, besides imp and
the mozilla client.
GH
Reply to: