The list has gone quiet for a little while so I thought I'd pipe up.  I 
wanted to let you all know how my testing has gone so far.  I am still 
running 8.22 on our production server, but am testing 2006.02 on my demo 
server.

(On a side note, I don't know why everyone doesn't test a new version of a 
product thoroughly, themselves, before upgrading their production servers. 
I am grateful for learning from the early-adopters what to look out for, but 
I feel bad for the administrators that write in franticly looking for help 
for a broken server after they do an upgrade.  I'm not one to be giving 
other much more proficient administrators advice, but I hope they learn a 
little from the experience and build a test server next time.  It is worth 
its weight in gold when it comes to avoiding down time from software 
upgrades.)

I have a 1ghz P3 Dell Optiplex desktop that is my test mule.  Woefully low 
on cpu and memory compared to a server, it works fine with only a few users 
accessing the apps.  I have been sending about 1000 emails a day to it and 
haven't had any issues with the qmgr, pop, or smtp.  We had an issue with 
Ldap not having a top level combined container for lookup as our SMTP 
gateway's (ASSP) ldap lookup isn't configurable, as written, to look at more 
than one container so we had to get creative :o).  As far as Imap and 
Imail's new webmail access, well frankly I was worried when I found out they 
discontinued their original webmail service.  My earlier testing with 
Imail's imap and SquirrelMail were not very positive in comparison to other 
email server programs and their imap.  After installing I was not surprised 
to find that the Webmail, though very pretty, was so slow as to be almost 
unusable with more than a handful of emails in the Main.mbx folder.  A 
folder with 200-300 emails would timeout trying to display the first 25. 
This occurred using Imail's webmail as well as Squirrelmail webmail running 
on Apache.  When switching over to a different IMAP server, stopping Imail's 
Imap, both Imail's and SquirrelMail's webmail would display the contents of 
large folders with >500 emails with no trouble.  This was disturbing so I 
set up a port redirector on the demo server and pointed demo:143 to 
production:143 and fired up IMAP on 8.22 running on our production server, 
an older Dell PE2450 733mhz x 2 with 2GB ram that handles our 5000 emails a 
day checked for AV and anti-spam, with no trouble and idles most of the 
time.  Now when I ran Imail2006 Webmail on demo it connected to the IMAP 
service on my production server.  It was far faster but still quite a bit 
slower than accessing the same folders using 8.22's webmail and was useless 
accessing one of my spam archives, 25MB with over 12k emails in it that 
8.22's webmail could open fine.

Then mysteriously, it changed!  For the better! :o)

Later that evening after some maintenance and a reboot, it was completely 
different.  It was night and day, much faster than before.  Almost 
completely functional, fairly fast access to mailboxes containing over 1000 
emails (but still not able to open my mbx with 12250 emails).  I don't know 
what change caused the improvement, but I did uninstall some leftover test 
software and added a missing DLL to my real-time AV scanner.  I'm going to 
try to pinpoint the culprit and my thoughts point at the AV software. We'll 
see.

Feature request: why oh why can't we have a more secure way to display the 
email in webmail?  There is no option besides html and full display of 
linked spammer photos.  SquirrelMail has an option to display email as plain 
text by default, and OE6 on XP SP2 has a great feature that blocks external 
images and gives the user the ability to click a button (bar) to see them. 
These would be excellent security minded additions to the current webmail.

Thanks for reading this far and thanks Ipswitsh, for a great product over 
the years.

Doug Traylor

PS: My hobbled together system on my production server for ~400 users on 2 
domains:

Internet -
ASSP(rejects spamming IP's via ACL/SPF/RBL - rejects invalid users with LDAP 
and flat file lookup)
 (also uses greylisting/delaying - ASSP has only passed 5 viruses to the AV 
in two weeks)  -
AV gateway1(deletes Viruses - message to me only) -
AV gateway2(blocks most known exploitable files and zips with notify to 
sender and me with instructions on how to bypass this particular blockade - 
hardcore) -
Imail 8.22


To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html
List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/
Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/

Reply via email to