Re: [Dovecot] [OT] Webmail Recommendation
On fredagen den 11 januari 2008, Mike Brudenell wrote: Whatever you do, DON'T move to Maildir if you are using the Prayer webmail software! We have used Prayer here for many years with the UW IMAP server backend and first Berkeley, then later MBX, format mail folders. When we migrated new users to Dovecoe with Maildir folders we discovered that Prayer does NOT like Maildir folders. The reason is that Maildir folders are dual-purpose: each can contain any mix of messages and sub-folders. However Prayer is intrinsically designed to ONLY work with folders that can contain messages or subfolders, but NOT both. The author of Prayer has (partly thanks to my patches adding UTF-8 and IPv6 support) recently released version 1.1.0 of Prayer which supports dual-use folders out of the box. -- Magnus Holmgren[EMAIL PROTECTED] (No Cc of list mail needed, thanks) signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: [Dovecot] [OT] Webmail Recommendation
On Friday, January 11 at 01:21 PM, quoth Hannes Erven: Before switching to dovecot, courier-imap handled the backend and I used Squirrelmail as the front-end. We used to use BincIMAP and Squirrelmail. imapproxy had a huge (positive) impact on performance, especially when browsing through folders with many messages. Startup (building the maildir tree with message counts) still took its time, and searching in Squirrelmail also was a pain. We had the same experience. Thanks to Dovecot, startup and search (in from/to, subject) now is really fast and I turned off imapproxy completely as it did not further improve the webmail's performance. I guess in environments where authentication is expensive (slow) imapproxy sure is worth a look at. We did the same, for the same reasons. Dovecot offered an order of magnitude increase (subjective) in responsiveness, and I couldn't tell the difference between using imapproxy and not using imapproxy---we removed it just to reduce the complexity of the system. ~Kyle -- There in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionist and rebel men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower pgpCyUcMKuWW5.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [Dovecot] [OT] Webmail Recommendation
On 1/10/2008, Timo Sirainen ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: No-one mentioned WebAlpine yet, which also uses persistent connections. I haven't tried it myself though. I though this is what imapproxy did for webmail? We only have one or two people who actually use ours (Squirrelmail), so it isn't an issue on our dual opteron server, but I've thought about installing it anyway... -- Best regards, Charles
Re: [Dovecot] [OT] Webmail Recommendation
On Fri, 2008-01-11 at 06:42 -0500, Charles Marcus wrote: On 1/10/2008, Timo Sirainen ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: No-one mentioned WebAlpine yet, which also uses persistent connections. I haven't tried it myself though. I though this is what imapproxy did for webmail? It makes connections look persistent to Dovecot, but it still forgets about its internal state, so it asks everything over and over again all the time. For example: request 1 1 LIST * 2 SELECT INBOX 3 FETCH ..stuff.. request 2 1 LIST * 2 SELECT INBOX 3 FETCH ..hopefully at least other stuff.. And perhaps more importantly, clients with persistent connections and persistent state can use IDLE (or even NOOP) to update its state about new mails, instead of polling them by using commands like UID SEARCH ALL or FETCH 1:* UID. signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: [Dovecot] [OT] Webmail Recommendation
Mike Brudenell wrote: Whatever you do, DON'T move to Maildir if you are using the Prayer webmail software! We have used Prayer here for many years with the UW IMAP server backend and first Berkeley, then later MBX, format mail folders. When we migrated new users to Dovecoe with Maildir folders we discovered that Prayer does NOT like Maildir folders. The reason is that Maildir folders are dual-purpose: each can contain any mix of messages and sub-folders. However Prayer is intrinsically designed to ONLY work with folders that can contain messages or subfolders, but NOT both. The result is that Prayer can show you the list of folders to navigate around, but will not list any messages within any folder. I had to hack Prayer to cope with users we'd migrated to coughExchange/cough that were being proxied through Dovecot so that they didn't need to change their mail client settings. (Exchange was marking folders as HASNOCHILDREN rather than HASNOINFERIORS and would put a trailing / on a non-selectable directory.) I'm not sure whether it would be Dovecot or Prayer I'd modify to deal with Maildirs! Chris -- --+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+- Christopher Wakelin, [EMAIL PROTECTED] IT Services Centre, The University of Reading, Tel: +44 (0)118 378 8439 Whiteknights, Reading, RG6 2AF, UK Fax: +44 (0)118 975 3094
Re: [Dovecot] [OT] Webmail Recommendation
Greetings - On 10 Jan 2008, at 21:49, Chris Wakelin wrote: With Dovecot's caching and indexing, things are much better, but there is still a significant overhead on opening lots of connections, I fear, especially for mboxes (moving to maildir would help of course). I would consider using imapproxy (designed to assist with this problem by caching the IMAP connections) but I'm not sure whether it would help significantly. Whatever you do, DON'T move to Maildir if you are using the Prayer webmail software! We have used Prayer here for many years with the UW IMAP server backend and first Berkeley, then later MBX, format mail folders. When we migrated new users to Dovecoe with Maildir folders we discovered that Prayer does NOT like Maildir folders. The reason is that Maildir folders are dual-purpose: each can contain any mix of messages and sub-folders. However Prayer is intrinsically designed to ONLY work with folders that can contain messages or subfolders, but NOT both. The result is that Prayer can show you the list of folders to navigate around, but will not list any messages within any folder. I checked with Cambridge and this is a known and documented restriction with Prayer. Their solution has been to hack Cyrus to prevent dual-use folders. (Timo kindly supplied us with a patch for Dovecot 1.0.x to do likewise.) We are thinking about moving to a different webmail platform soon, so I am following this discussion with interest. I can confirm that webmail software that uses persistent IMAP connections is a big win: it not only lightens load on the webmail server machine but also, more importantly, on the IMAP servers. Cheers, Mike B-) -- The Computing Service, University of York, Heslington, York Yo10 5DD, UK Tel:+44-1904-433811 FAX:+44-1904-433740 * Unsolicited commercial e-mail is NOT welcome at this e-mail address. *
Re: [Dovecot] [OT] Webmail Recommendation
On Fri, 2008-01-11 at 13:36 +0100, Ralf Hildebrandt wrote: * Chris Wakelin [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Last time I looked at it, imapproxy cached authentication (but so can Dovecot!) but not SELECTs (i.e. opening a mailbox), which is why I wondered how useful it would be. ## enable_select_cache ## ## This configuration option allows you to turn select caching on or off. ## When select caching is enabled, up-imapproxy will cache SELECT responses ## from an imap server. # enable_select_cache yes I looked at this code 3 years ago, don't know if it's been changed: I'd also advise against using it's SELECT-cache feature (disabled by default), since its design is fundementally broken. It may cause random problems with clients if the same mailbox is opened by multiple clients, or if the mailbox is modified behind up-imapproxy. signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: [Dovecot] [OT] Webmail Recommendation
Hi folks, I'd like to throw in some real world experience: my IMAP server runs for just a few users, but they have huge maildirs (1GB each) with hundreds of folders and, in some folders, thousands of messages. Before switching to dovecot, courier-imap handled the backend and I used Squirrelmail as the front-end. imapproxy had a huge (positive) impact on performance, especially when browsing through folders with many messages. Startup (building the maildir tree with message counts) still took its time, and searching in Squirrelmail also was a pain. Thanks to Dovecot, startup and search (in from/to, subject) now is really fast and I turned off imapproxy completely as it did not further improve the webmail's performance. I guess in environments where authentication is expensive (slow) imapproxy sure is worth a look at. Best regards -hannes
Re: [Dovecot] [OT] Webmail Recommendation
* Chris Wakelin [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Last time I looked at it, imapproxy cached authentication (but so can Dovecot!) but not SELECTs (i.e. opening a mailbox), which is why I wondered how useful it would be. ## enable_select_cache ## ## This configuration option allows you to turn select caching on or off. ## When select caching is enabled, up-imapproxy will cache SELECT responses ## from an imap server. # enable_select_cache yes -- Ralf Hildebrandt ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Postfix - Einrichtung, Betrieb und Wartung Tel. +49 (0)30-450 570-155 http://www.arschkrebs.de SMTP is cute, fluffy and goes Woof! When well treated she wags her tail, licks your face and delivers your mail. When badly treated by spammers or people running exchange/insert other pseudo-SMTP systems here/etc she tends to bite back.
Re: [Dovecot] [OT] Webmail Recommendation
Timo Sirainen, on 1/11/2008 6:54 AM, said the following: On Fri, 2008-01-11 at 06:42 -0500, Charles Marcus wrote: On 1/10/2008, Timo Sirainen ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: No-one mentioned WebAlpine yet, which also uses persistent connections. I haven't tried it myself though. I though this is what imapproxy did for webmail? It makes connections look persistent to Dovecot, but it still forgets about its internal state, so it asks everything over and over again all the time. For example: snip Ahh... ok, thanks for the precise and informative explanation... :) -- Best regards, Charles
Re: [Dovecot] [OT] Webmail Recommendation
On Jan 10, 2008, at 9:16 PM, Timo Sirainen wrote: So I wrote my own. http://dinhe.net/~aredridel/projects/ruby/camping-at-the-mailbox Missing screenshots. :) http://dinhe.net/~aredridel/projects/ruby/camping-at-the-mailbox-screenshots Cheers!
Re: [Dovecot] [OT] Webmail Recommendation
On Jan 11, 2008, at 4:50 AM, Chris Wakelin wrote: Charles Marcus wrote: On 1/10/2008, Timo Sirainen ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: No-one mentioned WebAlpine yet, which also uses persistent connections. I haven't tried it myself though. I though this is what imapproxy did for webmail? We only have one or two people who actually use ours (Squirrelmail), so it isn't an issue on our dual opteron server, but I've thought about installing it anyway... Last time I looked at it, imapproxy cached authentication (but so can Dovecot!) but not SELECTs (i.e. opening a mailbox), which is why I wondered how useful it would be. It's not all its cracked up to be. Honestly, a webmail client that truly takes advantage of IMAP's features is a stronger win.
Re: [Dovecot] [OT] Webmail Recommendation
Il giorno ven, 11/01/2008 alle 06.16 +0200, Timo Sirainen ha scritto: On Thu, 2008-01-10 at 15:19 -0700, Aria Stewart wrote: OK, let's try to get a bit more on topic and go back to the original question of what's a good webmail client for Dovecot? We went with Prayer Webmail (written by the University of Cambridge) as it's killer feature was *persistent* IMAP connections. Persistence is a total win for webmail. It's among the issues I had with everything written in PHP. I use http://freshmeat.net/projects/imapproxy/ for that. works fine. Marcello Nuccio
Re: [Dovecot] [OT] Webmail Recommendation
Hello Peter, Thursday, January 10, 2008, 8:17:15 PM, you wrote: All the suggested ones have just one big FAT problem - they are all written in that security bug ridden language that the hackers just love to exploit - PHP. Running a web application available to the whole wide internet written in PHP is just asking for someone to break into your systems. That's pretty much off-topic but for anyone interested just in web mail systems and less so in holy wars stuff: don't worry, it is not that bad. It is not bad at all, actually :) I _really_ _really_ wish someone would write a nice webmail system in some other language... Like a Ruby-on-Rails one (I've found a few, but they aren't actively maintained anymore). Hadn't you mentioned specifically RoR (or any other of the buzzwords/ newcomings) I'd have taken your opinion as a warning (aggresively voiced, but still a warning about security -- a useful thing to have). What you've written, however, is pretty unbalanced. You made it difficult to consider it 'useful' or 'informative'. It is more of misinformation than information. But let's not discuss it here, it's Dovecot list. -- Best regards, Robert Tomanek mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Dovecot] [OT] Webmail Recommendation
OK, let's try to get a bit more on topic and go back to the original question of what's a good webmail client for Dovecot? We went with Prayer Webmail (written by the University of Cambridge) as it's killer feature was *persistent* IMAP connections. Persistence is a total win for webmail. It's among the issues I had with everything written in PHP. So I wrote my own. http://dinhe.net/~aredridel/projects/ruby/camping-at-the-mailbox It uses the ruby Camping framework, and runs as its own daemon or fastcgi process. It's working relatively well, and has a sparse, low-fi but pretty usable interface. I'm actively taking patches, too, and am interested in grafting on an AJAX-additional interface. Aria
Re: [Dovecot] [OT] Webmail Recommendation
On Thu, 2008-01-10 at 15:19 -0700, Aria Stewart wrote: OK, let's try to get a bit more on topic and go back to the original question of what's a good webmail client for Dovecot? We went with Prayer Webmail (written by the University of Cambridge) as it's killer feature was *persistent* IMAP connections. Persistence is a total win for webmail. It's among the issues I had with everything written in PHP. Right. I've also thought about writing a webmail some day because most of them use non-persistent connections. But maybe not if a usable persistent webmail pops up. :) I was thinking about keeping most of the more complex logic in a Dovecot webmail-plugin and have the actual web interface be pretty dummy. No-one mentioned WebAlpine yet, which also uses persistent connections. I haven't tried it myself though. So I wrote my own. http://dinhe.net/~aredridel/projects/ruby/camping-at-the-mailbox Missing screenshots. :) signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: [Dovecot] [OT] Webmail Recommendation
* Chris Wakelin [EMAIL PROTECTED]: With Dovecot's caching and indexing, things are much better, but there is still a significant overhead on opening lots of connections, I fear, especially for mboxes (moving to maildir would help of course). I would consider using imapproxy (designed to assist with this problem by caching the IMAP connections) but I'm not sure whether it would help significantly. It helps a lot. -- Ralf Hildebrandt ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Postfix - Einrichtung, Betrieb und Wartung Tel. +49 (0)30-450 570-155 http://www.arschkrebs.de Eh? Linux is luserproof? What kind of proper set up is that, ripping out all removable media devices and ethernet, freezing the hard drive spindle, encasing it in concrete and dropping it off a pier?
