On Wed, 2 Apr 2003, Mark Crispin wrote: > On Wed, 2 Apr 2003, Ralf Utermann wrote: > > On the other hand a lot (most?) webmail gateways use imap to > > communicate and yes, they start a new imap for every user action, then > > close it. > > True. One of the main motivations that led to our developing WebPine was > to have a webmail system that didn't do that.
Is WebPine available? Other open-source alternatives or optimizations include Prayer (a from-scratch C reimplementation of WING, which appears defunct) and pitt-imapproxy, a caching proxy that still scares me. Courier fans will find courier webmail much faster. Unfortunately, once your users are hooked on the prettier features that the much larger IMP (or Squirrelmail) community is able to provide, you can't go back. We are seeing a significant benefit from having IMP do cleartext, even with hardware SSL acceleration. I don't think the processing load of opening an IMAP mailbox and running SELECT INBOX compares with SSL -- provided that you're smart and use mbx format rather than unix mbox. What does kill you is disk I/O. Your server must have enough RAM to keep all active webmail users' inboxes in cache. -- Rich Graves <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> UNet Systems Administrator
