Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Sun, 23 Feb 1997 09:48:45 -0800 (PST)
From:      patl@Phoenix.Volant.ORG
To:        rjmcintire@wilshire.net
Cc:        "'FBSD ISP'" <freebsd-isp@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: Cyrus IMAP server
Message-ID:  <ML-2.3.856720125.3628.patl@asimov.phoenix.volant.org>
In-Reply-To: <199702222321.PAA16211@train.tgci.com>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> Anyone have any experience, thoughts, suggestions on IMAP servers 
> under freebsd?
> 
> I'm thinking in particualar of the Cyrus IMAP Server...

I've been using Cyrus for a while here.  It is the only IMAP
server that I've worked with; so I can't offer any comparisons.
I've found it fairly easy to install and maintain.  So far,
my few customers have all had IMAP-capable mail agents; so I
haven't bothered to set up the daemon to allow POP3 access to
the IMAP mailboxes.

I replaced sendmail with exim; and set up rules to deliver into
a user's Cyrus mailbox if one exists; and to deliver to a traditional
unix mailbox if not.  With the filtering capabilities of the .forward
enabled, incoming mail can easily be split into separate personal IMAP
mailboxes based on header and/or body content matching.  This could
probably also be done with sendmail and procmail.  The one thing to
be careful about is that the Cyrus deliver program must run as user
cyrus.  (Or whatever user you have set up to actually own the mailboxes
and run the daemon under.)  For obvious reasons you don't want to just
make it suid.


On a related subject...

I have no personal need to access my mail from outside the office;
but while testing the setup with ML, I found I liked it so much
that I've switched over.  (Before, I was forwarding my mail to my
SPARCstation and using the OpenLook MailTool or CDE dtmail; with
a hand-crafted perl program to split incoming mail into separate
folders.)  If you are looking for a good unix GUI mail user agent
for an IMAP environment, I heartily endorse ML.  It makes it easy
to create and access multiple mailboxes, multiple servers, and
multiple accounts on a single server.  (In addition to the usual
local mail folder support.)  About the only thing it doesn't
provide is access to the Cyrus access control lists.  The bad news
is that it uses Motif.  I haven't tried building it under Lesstif
yet.  (I'm running it on the SPARCstation - I do most of my work
there because the type4 unix keyboard has a much saner layout than
the AT-101 on the PCs.  And X11 mean not having to sit at the machine
you are running on...)


-Pat




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?ML-2.3.856720125.3628.patl>