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Recommendations for the Right IMAP Server?
"I'm still at a loss for what to do. The documentation of all but uw-imap seem to be a bit complex for me. If it helps, I'd like to point out that I have Mutt and nbsmtp installed, which work fine for connecting to our SMTP and POP servers. How do I know what will serve our needs the best? Also, is there an IMAP server that I could install easily for testing and learning purposes? I'd like to be able to get something installed without much configuration. Security shouldn't be an issue for testing purposes, because it will only be on the local network, and the computer will be turned off when I'm not actively testing it. We're also willing to purchase products as well. We're willing to hire a professional to do it for us, but the boss wanted some research done so that we know what we're getting. Any comments are welcome. Thanks in advance."
Gentoo has a HOWTO using various packages here.
Why not try Microsoft? From everything I read here, they are well respected and only put out top-notch, high quality products.
Anyway.. Cyrus IMAP seems to be the best of breed IMAP server. Its desigined to work in a 'black box' enviroment, where the users dont need 'real' accounts on the machine - and if they did would have to use IMAP to access their mail anyway.
Its ACL features might be of significant use for a work enviroment (Im planning on deplying it in an ISP enviroment, so its not much help to me). Its heavy reliance on SASL is a bit tricky to get working, but recent IETF decisions seem to mean that SASL is a necessity for just about anything.
http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/cyrus-overview-TOC.ht ml
Don't do it. Outsource it to a datacenter. There's absolutely zero reason for you to do this yourself. The correct answer is to pay a service provider a small fee to take care of the servers, the backups, the security, the maintenance, and all of that bullshit for you.
Don't.
The real issue is the mailbox format. It is possible to run more than one imap daemon. Your choices are Maildir, Maildir and Maildir. There are others, but Maildir is really the best. Most IMAP, servers, however, require a patch to use Maildir. Courier was built with Maildir natively. I've now been running Courier for 6months and it's the best IMAP daemon I've ever ran.
You'll also need an SMTP server, which you didn't mention. Qmail, in my humble opinion, is the only solution out there. I found setup to be a little more complex than I felt necessary, but since I set it up, there hasn't been a hiccup. It easily allows you to instert ANYTHING into the chain the mail follows, so it extremely configurable.
Don't even bother looking at anything but QMail and Courier-IMAP.
Don't listen to the people that assume it's a bear in production. It makes life so much easier. First of all, here is everything you will need to get a courier-imap server up and running with SSL and Postfix and MySQL and Mailmail and Squirrelmail.
Virtual Mailhosting System Guide
I can vouch for this system because I did it and use it. Works wonderfully. The client had no use for Mailman, so I didn't install it. The client also only had 4 company domains he was concerned with, so he isn't taking full advantage of the virtual hosting aspect of the system. Smart choice going with Gentoo. Keeping the machine up to date is so easy, the client is doing it. Just a small bombshell to avoid, don't use Reiserfs unless you don't want to support quotas. This customer had a need for quota on the same server and I had to go through hell tracking down the patches for Reiser quota and getting them installed. Chris Mason was VERY helpful when I had problems. THANKS CHRIS!
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
Needing answers to the same question, yesterday i bought a copy of this book: Managing Imap Perhaps you should get hold of it too. It covers the whole IMAP thing and Cyrus and UW in detail. If you are not worried about using proprietary s/w, and want something easy to set up for testing, have a look at Communigate. This is a complete mailserver solution, very quick to install set up configure, has an IMAP module and lots more. A licence costs $$ but the free version is identical save for a 1-line- text advert appended to outgoing emails. (Linux versions available, don't know how it would fit with Gentoo though)
Gentoo's focus seems to be doing everything better. Speed, security, and stability. You HAVE the option of installing bleeding edge crap or stable crap with one setting in your make.conf. I'm now up to 20 Gentoo machines I support and I'm truly starting to consider it the equal of the FreeBSD machines I have in place. Most recently I had to pick an OS for new hardware. The hardware is dual processors ServerWorks chipset 1U's with a gig of ram. I could not get DMA working with FreeBSD using the Serverworks IDE controller on drives. Gentoo worked fine and supported DMA just fine with the latest kernel. In fact, I have had zero problems to date with any of the Gentoo boxes I have set up and they are pretty much running close to the redline 24/7. Of course, that's actual real world experience and not speculation.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
I've been running uw-imapd on a FreeBSD 5.0 system, along with sendmail (latest and greatest) for about the last 1.5 years with zero problems. Depending on the size of your company, this may or may not be a good solution. Please bear in mind that this is my personal mail server -- it serves exactly one account.
/etc/inetd.conf, and you're good to go
Plusses:
o Absolutely dirty simple to set up -- no config files, no settings, just dump the port on, add a line to
o Resonably secure; supports SSL
o Also supports POP3 and POP3 over SSL
Minuses:
o Each account needs a corresponding user on the system (you can, however, block login, I believe, to those users, such that they can not actually log into the system
o Administration requires adding accounts on the system and FS-level quotas (if you care)
o No fancy options or web/GUI's -- for me this is a plus, but it depends on how fancy your setup needs to be.
I've heard very good things about both Courier and Cyrrus but decided against them for my own use for a variety of reasons (mostly complexity).
Depending on your group size, uw-imapd may or may not be the right choice for you. Personally, however, I'd recommend running your mail server on an honest-to-god production-grade OS, like Free/Open BSD or a good Linux distro. And put it behind a good firewall. Gentoo is pretty cool, but mail MUST ALWAYS work, and to me that means running a production-quality, bullet-proof OS.
- Courier IMAP - Supports Maildir, works well with most IMAP webmail setups, easy to setup, support Secure IMAP
- Postfix for SMTP - Can offload mail delivery to another program like Procmail, replaces Sendmail
- Procmail for Delivery - The Great thing about IMAP is that you have message folders on the server, procmail will allow you to sort incoming mail as it arrives.
- Spamassassin - Integrates with Procmail to sort spam into a folder or
/dev/null
- SquirrelMail - Seems to be one of the best web based IMAP clients around, done in PHP
The reasons I picked the above: Free, Wanted IMAP for server-side folders, needed Maildir support because I didn't want to use mbox because of performance and locking issues, and I needed webmail and an IMAP server known to work well with webmail.My Hello World is 512 bytes. But it's also a valid Fat12 boot sector, Fat12 file reader, and Pmode routine.
OpenBSD, hardened Sendmail from the default install, and Dovecot. Can't beat it. It just keeps going and going and going... </energizer-bunny>
One good thing, too, about OpenBSD is that it's very, very light on your hardware. I did mail for more users than you're talking about on a P166. Make sure to use SMTP auth with Sendmail, though. And, yeah, I do consulting too. Send me an email if you're interested and we can talk.