[geeks] Help Please, Email server question.

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

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.

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.

> Stay away from imap-uw -- it's so badly written that more major security
> flaws are a certainty.

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.

> I don't know a lot about Courier-IMAP, but it is popular and seems to
> have suffered fewer vulnerabilities.  It's biggest drawback, from my
> point of view, is that it requires mail be delivered in Maildir format,
> so that rather restricts your choice of MTA (though to good enough ones).

Maildir sounds like a good idea if the server is just a mailserver, or if
you don't ever want to read your mail locally off the filesystem.  It's
inherently better for searching/updating than mbox, but I think I'd rather
see a mail system that took Netscape 3.x's approach of mbox with an
external index.


[1] I'm breaking my own rules by making the mail server something other
    than a mailserver, but celestrion.net is just a toy project of mine,
    and I don't want to colo another system at Kirby's house. :)

-- 
Jonathan Patschke
   > Can you SysAdmins tell me what might go on in a typical day?
   Hours of endless frustration punctuated by moments of sheer terror.
                                 --Saul Tannenbaum (in the Monastery)