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I run qmail for sending/receiving mail (on Gentoo; netqmail package), using maildir, of course. On top of that, I run the Courier IMAP server on my internal network (with TLS encryption). Until a few months ago I used Mutt as a client (console-based), but I've moved to using Roundcube (web-based email), which I initially installed for my wife, and have been happy with it. I also have some automatic filtering to folders via Maildrop (another Courier utility; it looks at a ~/.mailfilter file to route mail).

Roundcube/the IMAP server's search is OK most of the time - I keep my inbox small and move older mail to sub-folders - when I want to do advanced searches or search large mailboxes I log in and grep through folders of interest; this works well with the maildir format with one file per message. Maildir was also quite resilient when I had a HD crash and needed to recover some lost mail (block scan for blocks that look like mail headers found most missing items, and I do better backups now - mail is under ~/.maildir and gets backed up automatically).

I would move older messages to maildir (there are plenty of mbox converters, and almost anything non-proprietary should be convertible to mbox or maildir via existing programs or a short perl script) - even if at some point maildir dies off entirely, which seems unlikely, converting it to another format will always be trivial due to its simplicity and it has the advantages mentioned above of being able to search easily with grep etc.

I run qmail for sending/receiving mail (on Gentoo; netqmail package), using maildir, of course. On top of that, I run the Courier IMAP server on my internal network (with TLS encryption). Until a few months ago I used Mutt as a client (console-based), but I've moved to using Roundcube (web-based email), which I initially installed for my wife, and have been happy with it. I also have some automatic filtering to folders via Maildrop (another Courier utility; it looks at a ~/.mailfilter file to route mail).

Roundcube/the IMAP server's search is OK most of the time - I keep my inbox small and move older mail to sub-folders - when I want to do advanced searches or search large mailboxes I log in and grep through folders of interest; this works well with the maildir format with one file per message. Maildir was also quite resilient when I had a HD crash and needed to recover some lost mail (block scan for blocks that look like mail headers found most missing items, and I do better backups now - mail is under ~/.maildir and gets backed up automatically).

I would move older messages to maildir (there are plenty of mbox converters, and almost anything non-proprietary should be convertible to mbox or maildir via existing programs or a short perl script) - even if at some point maildir dies off entirely, which seems unlikely, converting it to another format will always be trivial due to its simplicity and it has the advantages mentioned above of being able to search easily with grep etc.

We recently switched to Roundcube (from Horde, which I had never liked but it worked decently with IMAP) for home email. Using IMAP (courier-imap and qmail) at least makes it easy to switch between clients. I never used Horde myself (preferred Mutt; I installed it for my wife) but I've actually started using Roundcube as my primary client. Very easy to set up and has all the functionality I need. I use maildrop on the server to filter incoming mail, and can switch to Mutt anytime it's more convenient (which is rare) or act directly on the maildir files (e.g., advanced grep expressions or move a set of messages by attribute) if necessary.

...can it also receive, store and send email? No? Didn't think so...

(Just moving my courier setup from one machine to another, incidentally...)

np: Yagya - Their Blood Is Black And Yellow (Will I Dream During The Process?)

How awful is Outlook's IMAP support???

In my experience, somewhere between "craptacular" and "OMG I WANNA GOUGE MY OWN EYES OUT WITH UNSHARPENED PENCILS!"

In particular, adding Outlook's casual disdain for open standards to Courier IMAP's "Ve vill do zis IN ORDNUNG und ve vill LIKE IT!" attitude towards standards compliance yields an almost unresolvable mess. In the end, I just abandoned trying to get Outlook to play nice and deployed Thunderbird or Evolution (depending on need) instead.

Yes, for example, you have Courier-MTA, which is a lovely and complete GNU GPLv2 package that closely follows standards and has lots of wonderful features, and a great filters API. For instance, you can implement SPF, Antivirus, Greylisting, several useful whitelistings and spamassassin in 5 minutes just by installing the pythonfilter package. http://www.courier-mta.org/ Although, to be fair, it lacks some milter-like filter API.

Do people really still use xinetd? I understand how on the 486 with 8 MB of ram you couldn't afford to keep all you services running all the time, but now?

In my mind this is just like the mbox vs. maildir arguement. It took about 10 years after MFM drives stopped being used until everyone realized that mbox wasn't faster anymore.

OfflineIMAP would fix most synchronization problems. Dovecot is a fast IMAP server and Maildrop coupled with your favourite smap filter could take care of the server part. Couple that with a good mail client (mutt) and a way to synchronize contacts. mutt can be customized with own keybindings, so that way one could add support for training the mail filter. I keep my home directory in a darcs repository to keep it in sync between machines. Other people use Subversion.

I switched from pine to CONE a long time ago. It looks nearly like Pine, but has integrated GPG support and works fine with IMAP folders.

See http://www.courier-mta.org/cone/cone00index.html for the website and http://wiki.splitbrain.org/cone for some info on compiling it.

I switched from pine to cone[1] a while ago and I love it

- Similar interface to pine
- Integrated GPG support
- handles IMAP and Maildir

[1] http://www.courier-mta.org/cone/

Well, that's what Courier is intended to be: a GPLed qmail.

So what patches do you feel are necessary?
-russ

Not just IMAP, but the whole shebang (MTA, webmail, POP3, IMAP, mailinglists, etc), plus you'd want OpenLDAP for storing all those passwords. I'm not sure how to set it up redundant and distributed, etc, but I'd wager that someone at the courier-mta website could point you in the right direction.

It's implemented by using a .mailfilter file in the user's home directory per the descriptions in the maildrop docs. How to change the .mailfilter file is left as an exercise to the reader but Courier's own webmail has support for it.

I would suggest RedHat or CentOS running CourierMTA http://www.courier-mta.org/.

The standard Courier bundle has everything you need for a mail server (web administration, webmail, imap4, pop3, TLS/SSL, filtering, mail lists, fax support, etc...). If desired, all you need to add is SpamAssassin and a virus scanner. I have been running this combo for years with great results.

-Nathan

Courier has an optional "big-brother" mode that makes a copy of every email that passes through. It can be set up as an email gateway and has a flexible authentication and filtering mechanism with standard plugins for SQL, LDAP, PAM, and others.

I assume this experience has lead you to evaluate the various options for your IMAP server software. What do you use?

I'm not the OP, but I used Courier for years, and then I switched to BINC ("BINC is not Courier").

There's also the old, hairy UW-IMAP package.

unfortunately hula doesn't appear to support maildir. only mbox.

the hula project also has some BS on their website about maildir being slower than mbox. this myth was disproven many moons ago:

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

My fave MTA, courier also won't do Sender-ID, but sticks with good-ol SPF.

And then be prepared to continue filtering out spam (although with my setup, of the 100+ daily messages that would get into my inbox without filtering, I now get about 10, all marked as spam, with the rest getting blocked by the rbl lists and some custom rules).

sometimes it is useful to have web-based email addresses

So run your own mail server and install IMP/HORDE or Squirrelmail.

I have been using Courier for over two years now. No remote roots ever or problems of any kind (I am amazed!). It's open sourced and a full package (esmtp, pop, imap, webmail and a thousand other things). It gets my vote.

I used it for a couple months because I wanted to have Maildir type mailboxes and wanted an IMAP server, it would crash all the time and give me all kind of troubles. I then switched to Binc IMAP (Binc is not courrier), which claim to be better than Courrier, but it was actually worse. It wouldn't last one week without crashing and send a lot of junk in syslog. I finally settled for dovecot with qmail. I have been running it for 6 months now without any problem.

I have been using Courier for over two years now. No remote roots ever or problems of any kind (I am amazed!). It's open sourced and a full package (esmtp, pop, imap, webmail and a thousand other things). It gets my vote.

I've never tried his DNS implementation, but I've heard it works nicely.

It does work nicely. Been using it for about 3 years now. No problems at all. After you get used to the DJB way of doing things, it is very simple to configure. The main data file makes more sense to me than BIND's stuff ever did.

But DJB is out there. One of these days, in my copious free time, I'll have to re-implement some of his better ideas, so that they can be released under a normal F/OSS license.

But I'm not using Qmail any more. Hasn't been updated in years, and to get needed features, it is patch hell. Switched to Courier MTA because I needed mail filtering, webmail and IMAP. I still like Maildirs though. Never had a problem with mailbox corruption or lost messages since we switched to that.

People are working on projects to replace SMTP, for examplem, SMAP:

http://www.courier-mta.org/cone/smap1.html

Looks interesting,

A.

What POP3 daemons support SSL _NATIVELY_?

I've got SSL support in Courier POP3 and IMAP daemons.

Yeah, well, that's why some qmail people are moving to Courier instead.

I started with qmail, because I liked Maildirs much better than mbox format. But then I needed an IMAP server. And then I needed a webmail server. And then I needed e-mail filtering.

So instead of installing all the pieces separately, I just installed Courier.

While the DJB-style configuration directories are kinda interesting, I perfer Courier's more mainstream configuration files.

Still using DJBDNS though. Small and simple, which is what I like.

I suggest somebody take a look at courier. It has all the features of qmail, postfix, exim and sendmail combined, minus all the drawbacks, is fully modular, includes POP3/IMAP servers, a web based interface, multiple authentication schema, SMTP AUTH enabled by default, anti virus software (RAV) and has a zero-vulnerability security history. It is GPL'ed too.

Then use Courier MTA or MTA+IMAP server, which is same maildir compatible as qmail, fast and beside: it's GPL - what can be more free than GPL?

Check out this detailed mbox vs. Maildir comparison. Maildir really knocks the socks off of mbox in almost all of the tests.

Courier's POP and IMAP servers (the IMAP server is used in this benchmark) have performed excellently for me in both qmail and Postfix installations.

Hmm. Looks like we do both agree djbdnd is NOT Open Source or Free Software.

It may not qualify according to RJS or ESR, but it's distributed in source form, without cost, and you're allowed to learn from the source code. My favorite email program was inspired by Qmail, and borrows much from Qmail's philosophy (if not directly from its code). Otherwise, I'd still be using Qmail.

...I could redistribute IE under those terms...

Except that you didn't write IE, and the people who did write it wouldn't allow source distribution because it would uncover all its defects.

Nobody questions the technical quality of djbdns...

Precisely my point. It's a small, quality, reference implementation of what a DNS server should be. Unlike the hideous hulking giant that is BIND.

...but that still won't get it shipped in any OS because of the wierd non-free license is was released under.

Just like the aforementioned IE won't get shipped in any OS, because of its weird, non-free license? At least Dan's software gets distributed because of technical excellence, not because of marketing muscle.

My company has been running/deploying/migrating several installations of Qmail+Courier-IMAP+IMP into Windows client/server networks for two years with much success. Our clients are pleased not only with the savings of money and licensing, but with the functionally and performance.

Recently we've found Twiggi as a Groupware solution for Linux. It provides webbased mail, contacts, scheduling, notes, todo and integrates with HylaFAX for faxing.

So far our clients love it.

Question?
Has anyone experienced MS Outlook and Outlook Express in a IMAP setup, duplicate mail if you change your hostname/IP of your IMAP server?

ie, Setup an IMAP account for mail.somedomain.fake and then later on change the hostname or give it an IP that points to the same mail server and have Outlook duplicate all your mail.

It's really frustrating to find Outlook setups pointing directly to the IP and then need to change it to use a hostname for say, SSL certificate reasons and then have users mail duplicate.

I have a similar problem. I'm trying to move all of my clients to IMAP (which I love), LDAP (which I don't like so far), and a nice group calendaring solution (which I haven't yet found, iCal perhaps?).

I found a lot of projects on Sourceforge that were in various stages and trying to solve the Exchange-on-server problem.

Courier looks promising. And here's a group calendaring option. Eridu is a sourceforge project in beta that tries to solve the problem with web-based email and calendaring, but you can't drag a message from one folder to another on a web page :(

IMAP works beautifully for storing and retrieving messages on the server, but Outlook (which I also hate) doesn't handle it too gracefully. Email notifications always send you to the Personal Folders inbox, rather than the IMAP server inbox. No way to fix that. I will probably always have to deal with Windows clients since that's what everyone is used to and programs with, so Evolution, nice as it seems to be, is not an option. I came across InScribe in my searches for a good email client with calendaring and inbox filtering. It might be worth a look.

I don't think that the whole email thing is a particularly good solution to the original question, but why should he pay for microsoft exchange when he could do this with any IMAP email server?

I have a cyrus imap server with webmail install that does exactly that. Also Courier MTA comes with a the pieces needed to do this btw.

Shared folders, server-side mail storage, SSL/TLS security are all part of the IMAP/IMAPS protocol that many ( most? ) free email servers support very well?

So why should he pay the $10-$40* per user license for microsoft exchange? *( lost track of the price )

Maildir: Do you really want to clutter your system with millions of small files? That's waste of inodes, space (unless perhaps you use Linux/ReiserFS or SGi)

and just try to open a Maildir with 1000+ mails and see how long it takes your favorite Mailprogram to only display the subjects.

That's interesting. Maybe you should start a fact-finding project. Just by yourself listing your goals and resources you've identified (RFCs, existing source code, API reference guides etc.) If other developers like what you've put together maybe something'll start from there.

I've seen the start and failure of at least one other groupware project, was not pretty :) And I'd say that first step of defining the project in detail is for one or two people only. Others can join later if they agree.

You can take a integrated mail daemon approach eg. http://courier-mta.org/ Which is an integrated ESMTP/POP/IMAP server, and try to add a calender server( whatever that is). Or create the standalone server as you said. I use Cyrus for IMAP/POP and sendmail for SMTP, so actually that way may suit me better. But I suspect starting with something like courier might be better for you.

I know little of exchange, but from what I've seen, I'm not impressed. A lot of functionality I see when someone says "hey, see what exchange can do", I can attribute to any IMAP or LDAP server. Any IMAP server can share folders for instances, etc. The shared calender is missing in OSS though.

Microsoft has release their Mail API, MAPI protocol ( don't know if that's pertinent to this cause ), and there are the free ICAL and MCAL libraries floating around the net for use.

Mozilla has a calendering client, they got it from some company, I can't remember. But it's not going to be in Mozilla 1.0 for sure. You can download CVS mozilla and build it yourself though. http://mozilla.org./projects/calendar/ That could be a good client to start with. Although developing with a mozilla based product can be a chore in inself, since it's hard to exert changes to the process as a non-aol developer.

OpenLDAP as the LDAP server.

I guess my point is, there's a lot of information, choices to be made at first. Maybe if you start by getting it all together and separating the impossible from what's not you might get a decent following?

Software must be sold to get the money to make more software. How else could a software company work?
He is right, at least in part. Look at MS, they have tones of cash (too much really). Which open source firm is even profitable? Anyone besides RH? GPL does bestow freedom *but* it does make it hard to charge money for your work. And yes, money is needed to make more software. I am not saying the MS way is perfect, far from it. They are heavily abusing their power.

I am a Linux user and it is 110% sweet to have a stable OS with a great web server & mail server (Courier in my case - it rocks) all for free. But I have an incredible sense of guilt when using it because I know that lots of people have put in their time and best effort to make this awesome software and that I'm not giving much in return.

(I can see the mod already: -1, Heretic)

My MTA of choice these days is Courier, it's written by Sam Varshavchik (aka Mr. Sam) who at one point seemed to be a disciple of DJB, having written gobs of other software that goes with qmail maildirs. Courier is a complete mail server, not just a sendmail replacement. Built in POP3/IMAP both supporting SSL/TLS. Web and/or standard config file based administration. Supports LDAP, PgSQL, and MySQL for authentication. Mail Filtering, List management, and even a webmail server. Even group calendaring. Who needs anything else? It's all integrated so there's no obscure set of howto's to search for when you want to get an imap server or an LDAP authentication service running. Oh and it's GPL'd... something you can't even begin to say about DJB's bizzare pseudo-opensource license. It's had a quarter of a million downloads off SourceForge, that's gotta say something.

If you like to built quiet computers, probably you can recommend us a quiet fun!
Which one is your choice?
Thanks in advance :)

www.courier-mta.org