IMAP server choices

[jjohnson at sunrise-linux.com (miah)]

On Mon, Nov 22, 2004 at 04:14:31PM -0500, Drew Taylor wrote:
> I'm thinking about setting up an IMAP server for my personal use for the 
> learning experience. What is the "best" one to use? And yes I know this 
> is highly subjective. :-)
> 
> I know about UW and courier, but I also came across dovecot (I think it 
> was from this list) which looks quite interesting. This will be running 
> on debian if that makes a difference.

dovecot is supposedly a secure imapd.  When I tried it several months
ago, I couldn't even get it to run.  I may have been doing something
stupid though =).

I've been using courier for a while now and its not too bad.  I've
been fairly happy with it, haven't had any issues with it.  It was
easy to setup, and configure SSL.

The thing that makes IMAPd's fun is some support Maildir only, some
support mbox only, some support both, if you have an already existing
mailserver and users setup and using it, it could make your discision
of imapd's change.  When I setup courier at work, we had been using
wu-imap as setup by the previous admin, and all the mail was stored in
mboxes.  Some users had around 1gig of email, and everytime one of
those users tried to do something it'd cause the system to crawl.
Remember mbox files are crap, to remove message number 456, 589, and
231 out of 8000 you end up doing lots of work =).  

This is why I switched to courier, and maildir style mailboxes.  I
knew my users would complain about mail quotas (academic environment,
where there was no rule enforcement before me.. its like teaching kids
to share, so its best to leave as it is =)).  Finding a good script to
convert from mbox to maildir took a while, I didn't want to re-invent
the wheel here, and the mbox file format is totally non-standard(which
people will argue about).

http://www.courier-mta.org/mbox-vs-maildir/

For me, I want my IMAPd to support Maildir, and SSL.  Wrapping a IMAPd
with stunnel isn't something I'd like to do.  I want stability and
security is obviously a good thing.  In that respect, Courier has been
good.

The script I used for converting is mb2md
http://batleth.sapienti-sat.org/projects/mb2md/

-miah