Hi

Im running a mail server that serves mail on a local LAN. most users read
mail through POP3, some users read mail through IMAP, and very few shell
users.

I  currently use a rather standard installation of wu-imapd (2001a) with a
couple of small local modifications.

The main problem of this is that when the mailbox gets big enough, it
takes considerable time (and CPU time) to open a mailbox, and it is also
impossible to have a mailbox open by two seperate clients similtanously
(unless it is readonly).

After some digging it seems that I have three options:

1. switch to courier-imap (cyrus and other were not considered, as I wan
   to keep users acounts)

2. [as sugested in the uw-imap faq] switching to their own mbx mailbox
   format instead of the standard milbox format.

3. switch to using qmail-style maildirs as the standard mailbox format

I have my reasons for trying to avoid (1). But I'm still interested in
hearing from someone using courier-imapd. Specifically: there is some FUD
against it for being very incompatible with imap clients. how is it in
reality?

regarding (2): the mbx format seems virtually unsupported. Practically no
mail client but pine reads it (although I mostly use pine), support is
mostly through the library c-client, of which there are several
statically-linked copies in my system (in pine and one in imapd!).

However it seems that the imap distribution is written in a way that
allows only sysadmins with extra spare time available to use it in their
system, as the tools available from the distribution are very inadaquent.
There is a set of extra "imap-utils" to assist you with manipulation of
mailboxes, but some of them have strange defaults that make it easy for
you to stick with the existing "unix" mailboxes.

(for more details search for my posts to comp.mail.imap)

As fr (3): I'm currently looking for a version of the maildir driver patch
for imap-2001a . I encountered some problems trying to apply the existing
version of the patch.

But I'd also like to here from people using either this patch or pine with
maildirs I'm not sure if it is the same code for pine, though): how well
does it perform? does it play along nicely with other programs?

In my current system I deliver mail with postfix (no procmail, except for
shell users) on an ext2 partition (converting to reiser/xfs in the near
future may be problematic).

I figure that this problem is shared not only by me. I'm looking for a
solution that could be applied relatively easily by other people (e.g: I
have initial RPMs of imap-utils, if anybody wants)

-- 
Tzafrir Cohen
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir




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