[geeks] Help Please, Email server question.

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Wednesday, September 4, 2002 at 12:03:34 (-0500), Jonathan C. Patschke wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [geeks] Help Please, Email server question.
>
> On Wed, 4 Sep 2002, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> 
> > For IMAP I'd highly recommend Cyrus IMAP, version 2.x if possible as it
> 
> I should probably just RTFM, but when I considered Cyrus as a UW
> alternative, this question wasn't readily answered.  Is it possible to set
> up Cyrus so that it uses /etc/passwd for authentication and stores the
> mail hive in the users' home directories?  I have a fair amount of mail in
> my mailbox hive (not in INBOX, but filed-away elsewhere) and not an
> abundance of space in /var/spool.

With the older 1.x series of releases that's easy -- just use 'pwcheck'.
Indeed with 1.6.x it is still supposedly just as simple as configuring
with '--with-login=unix_pwcheck' as per the README in the pwcheck
sub-directory.  I think this means you have to use STARTTLS with the
IMAP connection (to make the connection secure), and then the "PLAIN"
auth mechanism.

With the newer 2.x versions that has turned into a Cyrus SASL question.
If I'm not mistaken though it's as simple as running saslauthd as per
its manual page.  (eg. with '-O getpwent' or '-O shadow' depending on
whether you are using *BSD or some system with a more primitive shadow
password implementation)

> The more I read about it, the more I like it.  Cyrus sounds -great- for a
> server that's just a mail server, but everyone on my system has shell
> accounts, anyway[1].  As such, the Cyrus "private datastore" paradigm is
> more administrative overhead for me than it is a benefit.

You can use wrapper scripts around unix mail clients to fetch the inbox
contents using POP, eg. using "movemail", and then invoke the mailer on
the retrieved file.  Or you can have your users use POP/IMAP capable
clients such as Pine, Mutt, VM-in-emacs, etc.

> Not to mention that its performance leaves much to be desired, especially
> if you enable ssl-imap.  The truly sad thing is that it's the de facto
> standard reference implementation of the IMAP protocol.

To paraphrase Henry Spencer:  standards are such wonderful things
because there are so many to choose from!  :-)

Cyrus IMAP is probably a better implementation of the protocol, never
mind being a better job at programming....  :-)

In any case the fact that Pine can interoperate just fine with Cyrus is
proof of the latter's interoperability.  :-)

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;            <g.a.woods at ieee.org>;           <woods at robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com>; VE3TCP; Secrets of the Weird <woods at weird.com>