Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2002 19:22:40 -0700 (PDT) From: Lamont Granquist <lamont@scriptkiddie.org> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> Cc: Jason Andresen <jandrese@mitre.org>, "Brandon D. Valentine" <bandix@geekpunk.net>, Darren Pilgrim <dmp@pantherdragon.org>, Evan Dower <evantd@hotmail.com>, <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Cyrus vs. UW IMAP (was: Re: I Volunteer) Message-ID: <20020620191939.U1870-100000@coredump.scriptkiddie.org> In-Reply-To: <3D128A0D.9599F9CF@mindspring.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Cyrus imapd is a real pain in the ass to administer local user accounts with though. The cyradm program is extremely deficient. Its great if you want to offer people imap e-mail without offering them shell access. For local access, though, there's a higher administrative overhead. I'm back to using the UW imapd even though I know it is a poorer codebase... On Thu, 20 Jun 2002, Terry Lambert wrote: > Jason Andresen wrote: > > "Brandon D. Valentine" wrote: > > > On Tue, 18 Jun 2002, Darren Pilgrim wrote: > > > >It's not exactly FreeBSD, but how about rewriting pine and uw-imap? > > > >Last I heard they could use a little work. > > > > > > It would have to be a complete reimplementation thanks to the retarded > > > pine license. Besides, pine has been surpassed and it's called mutt. > > > uw-imap has also been quite surpassed, it's called cyrus. > > > > I thought the strength of uw-imap was that it was fairly easy to > > configure for a machine with local users. The same certainly > > couldn't be said for Cyrus. Heck, I nearly slit my own wrists > > out of frustration trying to get Cyrus working. Doesn't help > > that its online documentation is poo either. > > The online documentation sucks, but once you understand that > you have to use an admin program (cyradm) that has to be able > to authenticate to the server in order to manage it, it's not > very hard at all. > > The main problem with UW-IMAP is that it has some serious bugs; > not only are there security bugs, but there are tons of bugs in > the user libraries -- which is what most people are using for > web based mail clients, and other programs... like "Pine". > > The main problem is that there are a lot of instances where it > is possible to result in calling unintialized function pointers > when you attempt to access a mailbox provider type. > > The easiest way to see this is to make the function pointer > containing struct into a pure virtual base class, each provider > into a implementation class for that base class, and then pass > around pointers to the provider class coerced to the virtual > base class. You'll see all sorts of errors reported by the > compiler about the use of a member of a class that can't be, > or for which there is not a member function defined. > > A long time ago, I did this exercise for a commercial company, > and found no less than 150 instances where this type of problem > existed in the UW IMAP code. > > My personal recommendation, having contributed patches to both > server maintainers, and used both servers in a commercia setting, > is that the Cyrus IMAP server is far and away the better code > base. > > -- Terry > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20020620191939.U1870-100000>