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Date:      Fri, 21 Jun 2002 11:21:36 -0400
From:      Jason Andresen <jandrese@mitre.org>
To:        "Brandon D. Valentine" <bandix@geekpunk.net>
Cc:        Darren Pilgrim <dmp@pantherdragon.org>, Evan Dower <evantd@hotmail.com>, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: I Volunteer
Message-ID:  <3D134480.8B7FB7D2@mitre.org>
References:  <20020620170155.P1108-100000@dallben.homeportal.2wire.net>

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"Brandon D. Valentine" wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 20 Jun 2002, Darren Pilgrim wrote:
> 
> >Personally I'm all for courier-imap.  IMAP and POP3, Maildirs, SSL, and
> >the ability to access both real and virtual mailboxes.
> 
> See my other recent message about the security implications of running
> courier-imap.  Also, maildirs are a mediocre idea for general use, and a
> horrible idea for high volume mail spools.  The whole idea behind IMAP
> is for the mail to reside on the mail server, not a user's workstation.
> Maildirs eat inodes like nobody's business.  If you're using FFS to host
> a fairly high traffic mail spool you'll probably need to newfs your
> filesystem with a /ton/ of inodes.  The only solution is to use a
> filesystem which dynamically allocates inodes like XFS.  Cyrus uses a
> much more efficient storage mechanism.

That's exactly where the difficulties come from.  Cyrus is a royal PITA
to convince to run on a machine that also has shells. 

For instance: in my case my local mail provider doesn't support IMAP
(and their mailserver is quite a long way away from me and behind
some rather laggy and slow pipes).  I wanted to be able to run Sylpheed
when I'm on the X console and pine when I'm remotely logged in.  The
only option (given that they use different mail formats) seemed to be to
dump all of my mail into a local IMAP server (it's not a ton of mail
either) so both programs could see it.  While the uw-imap can do this
with a bit of prodding (you have to change a variable in a dependancy 
to get it to no spew your imap directories all throughout your home 
directory), it works OK.  I originally tried Cyrus IMAP (because it
was supposedly better), but nearly pulled my head off trying to get
all of the authentication/permission/configuration/login/etc issues
worked out.  I never actually did successfully create a subdirectory 
on the Cyrus server, and after poring over the tons of not-very-helpful
docs, I eventually gave up and went to the uw solution.  UW might
not be the best technically, but I wasn't going to have to spend 6 
weeks learning the intricacies of the permissions system on my
IMAP server to get it working.

-- 
  \  |_ _|__ __|_ \ __| Jason Andresen        jandrese@mitre.org
 |\/ |  |    |    / _|  Network and Distributed Systems Engineer
_|  _|___|  _| _|_\___| Office: 703-883-7755


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