[ILUG] IMAP server

[Adrian Flynn]

I have just implemented a cyrus server on SuSE 7.2 linked to postfix, amavis
and spamassassin. Everything works very well on the server, and I have set
up SquirrelMail 1.2.6 as my webmail client.

The only downside is using Outlook as a client - it doesn't like IMAP
folders very much. It works OK as a POP3 client, but then you lose the
functionality of webmail and Outlook using the same message store. I am
short of time at the moment, but will pursue this problem further very soon.

Bottom line - it works, well, but is tricky to set up

Rgds

Adrian Flynn

-----Original Message-----
From: ilug-admin at linux.ie [mailto:ilug-admin at linux.ie]On Behalf Of
Matthew French
Sent: 27 June 2002 11:12
To: ilug at linux.ie
Subject: [ILUG] IMAP server


Hello all.

We have a customer who has a requirement for an IMAP server. But they also
have several other requirements which *I* believe we can implement, but I
want to verify that my thinking is correct.

These requirements are:

1. An auto-reply facility: There is no standard IMAP way to do this, but my
feeling is that a web page can be used to administer the account profile,
including the auto reply?

2. They want MIMEsweeper, but only so that they can reject .exe, .bat, and
all the other usual suspects. Am I correct that procmail can do this?

3. They want a spam filter. I am not sure what they have been told, but I
suspect they want some magic formula that will reject only spam. They also
want to reject mails that have pornographic or lewd content. My thinking is
that SpamAssasin fits the role. Unfortunately I have never used it, so I
want to make sure that it is easy enough to configure, and to administer.

4. They want a facility to access IMAP mail from home. My thinking is IMAP
over SSL. The majority of their mail clients are Outlook Express. I want to
know if anyone has succesfully integrated a Linux IMAP server and Outlook
Express using SSL?

5. They might want to impose quotas. I have never had to use Linux
filesystem quotas, and my problem is that it looks fairly complicated to
administer. Again, a web front end should help... The alternative is to have
a cron-job run nightly and check the size of the mailbox and mail warnings
as appropriate.

I would also like to be able to archive old mails (say > 3 months) and
automatically clear out messages marked for deletion. Are there toolkits
available that would let me script these tasks?

Does anyone know of a generic web frontend for using and administering
common IMAP servers, such as the UW and Cyrus varieties. A webmail frontend
would also be a useful selling point.

And of course there is the religious issue: which IMAP server? :) UW is
simple to set up but I don't know if it will support 40+ users? Cyrus is
more complicated to administer and I have had problems with Courier that
were small but put me off trying it further. There is also a product called
DBMail (http://www.dbmail.org) which looks like an interesting possibility -
it uses MySQL as the message store.

Any other suggestions and recommendations will be welcome. Comments such as
"Don't do it" with suitable reasoning would also be appreciated. :)

- Matthew



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