IMAP

Posted by: schofiel

IMAP - 25/11/2004 14:16

Can anyone point me to a good article/tutorial/resource etc. for IMAP?

Anyone know of a windows freeware IMAP server that can cross-connect to a POP server for mail download? Alternatively, on Free BSD or Linux Suse?
Posted by: peter

Re: IMAP - 25/11/2004 14:43

http://www.washington.edu/imap/

On Linux (and probably BSD): UW imapd (from that page) plus fetchmail for POP retrieval.

Peter
Posted by: Roger

Re: IMAP - 25/11/2004 14:57

Quote:
UW imapd


Eww, world's worst IMAP server.
Posted by: Roger

Re: IMAP - 25/11/2004 14:59

Quote:
Can anyone point me to a good article/tutorial/resource etc. for IMAP?

Anyone know of a windows freeware IMAP server that can cross-connect to a POP server for mail download? Alternatively, on Free BSD or Linux Suse?


For what? If it's downloading from POP, then why use an IMAP server?

If you want an IMAP server, but some of your mail is in POP boxes, then you should do as Peter says, and look into fetchmail or getmail to grab the POP mail, and UW imapd, Courier IMAP or BincIMAP for the IMAP portion.

These are Linux (or Unix) solutions, rather than Windows. You're unlikely to find a decent freeware Windows IMAP server, but I might be wrong.
Posted by: peter

Re: IMAP - 25/11/2004 15:27

Quote:
Eww, world's worst IMAP server.

Yes. Most interoperable, though, sadly.

Peter
Posted by: wfaulk

Re: IMAP - 26/11/2004 16:50

Dunno about Windows, but I've used Cyrus IMAP under various Unices for a long time. It works quite well and has built-in POP support. It can be a bit of a bear to get installed, though.
Posted by: Daria

Re: IMAP - 26/11/2004 16:55

I don't know of any which can be used to proxy to another protocol. There are certainly imap to imap proxies.

For reasons which may be obvious, I'll plug Cyrus IMAP
Posted by: tonyc

Re: IMAP - 26/11/2004 17:11

I also recommend Cyrus, even though I'm not (yet) an employee of CMU. Been using it for 6+ months and it's been great. If you dig deep enough to learn a litle about Sieve, you can have all your mail nicely sorted into IMAP folders automagically.
Posted by: wfaulk

Re: IMAP - 26/11/2004 17:15

And I'd argue that it's no less interoperable than UW-IMAPd, which is probably most correctly pronounced "Eww. IMAPd".
Posted by: drakino

Re: IMAP - 26/11/2004 17:43

I personally have used Courier IMAP for a while, first on my SuSE server and now on my Gentoo server. Some nice multiple domain Howtos exist, as well as Gentoo specific ones.

My main reason to go with Courier was the support for Maildir. Others have support for it as well now, but back when I initially looked, it was the suggestion for a server with support for it. Just make sure to pair it with a filesystem that likes lots of tiny files, like reiserfs. Oh, and if you go with Courier, get used to the political fight between them and I think the UW folks. It's about as bad as the fights between Debian users and RedHat users.
Posted by: Roger

Re: IMAP - 27/11/2004 06:31

Quote:
My main reason to go with Courier was the support for Maildir.


I went with BincIMAP for its Maildir support, plus its integration with qmail feels cleaner. There's also a smidgen of politics there, too: Binc = "Binc is not Courier".

As for interoperability, I'm not that bothered if it doesn't work with everything: it works fine with Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird and SquirrelMail, which is all I need.
Posted by: andy

Re: IMAP - 27/11/2004 07:28

I am still stuck using UW, for two reasons:

- I'd have to rewrite a whole bunch of shell scripts that rely on my mail being in one-file-per-folder mailbox format (scripts that make training my spam filters as easy as moving wrongly classified messages into the right folder)
- my efforts to install any of the other IMAP servers on my aged RH 7.1 machine have aways ended in frustrated failure

I do get fed up with UW slowing down as I get more mail, but I think I'll just throw some more hardware at it instead...
Posted by: peter

Re: IMAP - 27/11/2004 11:29

Quote:
I'd have to rewrite a whole bunch of shell scripts that rely on my mail being in one-file-per-folder mailbox format

Yeah, that's what I really meant by best interoperability: not with IMAP clients particularly (they're all pretty good for that) but with other mail-processing software (grepmail, local MUAs) on the server.

Peter
Posted by: drakino

Re: IMAP - 27/11/2004 17:41

Quote:
but with other mail-processing software

Postfix supports delivering to maildir just fine. Procmail also works well, and has the advantage of being able to process multiple messages with file locking out of the way. Grepmail, never personally used, but mairix offers the same features on maildir files. Spamassassin has a learning mode and can learn from messages in a maildir folder.

I do enjoy that rm works to delete a message, and mv ../new can mark it unread again. For me, I moved to maildir the same time I implemented IMAP, so the transition was easier.