IMAP problems with SuSE 9.0

[mark at buttery.org (Mark J. Dulcey)]

David Kramer wrote:
> On Monday 02 February 2004 2:10 pm, Mark J. Dulcey wrote:
> 
>>I remember that Dave Kramer talked about this a while ago, and some people
>>came in with suggestions... what turned out to be the answer to get IMAP
>>to work properly? (Basically, the problem is that the imapd distributed
>>with 9.0 only accepts SSL connections, and the squirrelmail that comes
>>with 9.0 doesn't support SSL, so the two don't play together. In addition,
>>I haven't been able to get the SSL to play with Mozilla at all.)
> 
> 
> (GRUMBLEGRUMBLEGRUMBLEGRUMBLEGRUMBLEGRUMBLEGRUMBLE)
> 
> This is the most sore point with SuSE 9.0 for me.  uw-imap has the above 
> limitation.  Squirrelmail won't work with it.  My wife's Outlook won't work 
> with it.  Evolution won't work with it.  The only clients I can get working 
> with it are KMail, pine, and Netscape Mail under Windows for my wife (which 
> she hates).  
> 
> I was never able to get courier or cyrus working with it either.  There were 
> some other biggies, but the fact that I could not get an IMAP server working 
> (and few would classify me as a newbie) frustrates my wife and myself to this 
> day.

Well, I decided to take matters into my own hands and rebuild the imap 
server package (the standard one supplied by SuSE, which is UW IMAP, not 
courier or cyrus). I started with the SuSE SRPM, made the changes to 
allow cleartext password login on non-encrypted connections, and 
installed it. This imap uses the standard mailbox file format, so it has 
the usual file locking limitations. (Mostly, it means that if you have 
an IMAP client open somewhere, and you also try to run a shell on the 
mail server and run Pine, Pine won't be able to expunge deleted messages 
from the mailbox.)

To keep it from being a huge security hole, I modified the xinetd 
configuration for imap and pop3 (also handled by the same package). 
Unencrypted imap and pop3 are only allowed from hosts on my own LAN, 
including the mail server itself - that means that squirrelmail works 
from anywhere, and all the usual clients work from here. If you're 
outside the house, you have to use an encrypted connection (or use 
squirrelmail to read your mail) - that limits your choice of clients, 
but you can still get in. Next step will be to put the squirrelmail on 
an https: virtual host to take care of that potential hole.

I can send people the updated RPMs for imap and the changes to the 
xinetd configuration if anyone wants them.