Hi, Miles. We recently switched from wu-imap to dovecot, mainly to gain
support for multiple read/write sessions per mailbox, and to reap the
performance gains of Dovecot's indexes on old-fashioned mbox files. We've
been very pleased with the results. In our case, we already had folks
using a pretty consistent folder location, and we felt like it was worth
the effort to help migrate the few stragglers in order to converge on One
True Folder Location. But if you have some knowledge of where folks store
their mail folders and don't want to deal with migrating everybody to one
location, I _think_ you can simply specify multiple folder paths in
dovecot's mail_location setting.
I also found it handy to define some extra namespaces in the dovecot
config. This allowed folks to access the new, captive folder location
without having to first tweak their old wu-imap-style "folder prefix" in
their client configs:
# default namespace
namespace private {
separator = /
prefix =
inbox = yes
}
# for backwards compatibility:
namespace private {
separator = /
prefix = Mail/
hidden = yes
}
namespace private {
separator = /
prefix = ~/Mail/
hidden = yes
}
namespace private {
separator = /
prefix = mail/
hidden = yes
}
namespace private {
separator = /
prefix = ~/mail/
hidden = yes
}
BTW, we also run cyrus elsewhere. It is quite lovely and a great choice
for brand-new mail servers. And if integrating into your NIS passwd
authentication system is your only issue, that is doable in the SASL
configuration - we authenticate our cyrus users from NIS. But migrating a
big existing mbox-based wu-imap service to cyrus seems pretty spooky to
me. Dovecot is a great compromise in this case, with features and
performance much closer to cyrus than to wu-imap, but with support for
your existing mbox files, and the ability to seamlessly migrate formats
later if the mood strikes you.
-Jan
On Fri, 10 Oct 2008, Miles O'Neal wrote:
Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2008 18:01:21 -0500 (CDT)
From: Miles O'Neal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Scientific Linux Users <[email protected]>
Subject: imap/pop server on EL5
We're replacing our older servers, most of which
are running EL3. The servers we want to handle
POP/IMAP with are running EL5. EL4 and EL5
dropped support for the xinetd-based imap. Cyrus
is way too complex, especially to tie in to the
standard NIS passwd/shadow setup (as far as I can
tell). We don'twant to set up another radius
server (we can't use the existing radius server
for reasons irrelevant to this discussion).
So I installed dovecot. It mostly works out of
the box, but wants to force users to migrate where
they keep their files. Most of our users like where
their files are, or are at least use dto it, and
don't want to have to learn new locations. Their
mail folder roots have a variety of names. Dovecot
is extremely configurable, but not in ways useful
to us.
What I *really* want is to just use the old imap
server from xinetd, as it was compatible with how
our users work. After quite a bit of searching, I
found exactly one rpm site with uw-imapd but it
had a dependancy for an rpm nobody seems to have
for EL5.
SO... does anyone have an EL5 RPM of the old imapd
for xinetd, or can anyone definitively tell me that
dovecot will search and use multiple folder root
dirs and point me to docs that explain how to do this?
[NOTE: I tend to just say EL because we have a mix
of SL and CentOS.]
Thanks,
Miles
