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Recommendations for the Right IMAP Server? 223

Posted by Cliff from the finding-the-one-for-you dept.
eugene ts wong asks: "Our company is planning on taking care of its own email, by setting up our own server. I've been given the task of researching what is out there. So far, I've got my heart set on an IMAP server that we can install on Gentoo. Unfortunately, email isn't our forte, and I really have no idea of where to start. I've made some google searches, browsed around on the IMAP site, and also found this email. According to the mutt documentation, Cyrus and Courier are the best choices." What IMAP servers have you used, and which ones would you recommend?

"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."
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Recommendations for the Right IMAP Server? More

Recommendations for the Right IMAP Server?

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  • Gentoo + Mail Servers (Score:5, Informative)

    by abartlett_219 ( 600259 ) <anoncow&gmail,com> on Tuesday September 09, 2003 @08:14PM (#6916325) Journal
    It looks as if Gentoo recommends the Courier-IMAP server, but an emerge search IMAP returns cyrus, courier, and uw-imap (plus a patched version of uw-imap for virtual domains).

    Gentoo has a HOWTO using various packages here [gentoo.org].

    • Re:Gentoo + Mail Servers (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Directrix1 ( 157787 ) on Wednesday September 10, 2003 @11:02AM (#6921336)
      University of Washington IMAP has known security holes (unless they recently patched it), Courier-IMAP and cyrus would probably work just fine, but as for me I'm just waiting for the James email server [apache.org] to finish their IMAP implementation. It is a nice, open, easy to use, non-*nix centric, and java based solution. Which supports java maillets which let you custom process each email on the server. Not to mention the fact that they have two different IMAP implementations already in CVS (all they have to do is adapt one of them which is in the process now). Just my two cents.

  • 1-800-Microsoft (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 09, 2003 @08:18PM (#6916346)
    Why not try Microsoft? From everything I read here, they are well respected and only put out top-notch, high quality products.

    • Dear God! Almost started ranting...

      Yeah, it's funny, but people really do post things like that.

      For example: "Half-life 2 will not be coming out for the PC, only for the Xbox, because the PC just can't handle the graphics that the Xbox can.

      Almost like someone coming on and saying XP is more stable than Linux.

  • Cyrus IMAP for sure.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by T-Ranger ( 10520 ) <jeffw@cheMENCKENbucto.ns.ca minus author> on Tuesday September 09, 2003 @08:19PM (#6916356) Homepage
    But first, do you realy want to use gentoo in a production machine? It may be fun to recompile everything, but for a production server, especially with something as important as email, gentoo isnt even a contender.

    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

    • I have to agree with the 'no gentoo on servers'. It's a wonderful distro, and I use it a lot, but it encourages you to be too bleeding edge... and that WILL bite you at some point.

      (Says I as I'm debugging a firewall issue at 9:00 PM...)

      Email is far to 'visable' a service to trust to something not rock solid.

      if [ mgmt.need = support-contract ]; then
      redhat.install
      else
      debian.install
      fi

      Debian stable is where I'd probably put such a thing. MAYBE debian testing.

  • Don't (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 09, 2003 @08:20PM (#6916363)
    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.
    • Hmmmm... maybe, maybe not.

      Make a list of requirements on reliability, service, and self determination that you need. From there look and see if any datacenter can supply that for you. If so, sure do it, if not... many times the right thing to do is to do it yourself. I run my own mail server for myself because I have found I can be much more reliable than my ISP on providing e-mail service - plus I like the ability to have a 1 Gbit connection to my mail server to download the mail from the spool extra f

    • Agreed. By the poster's admission, "they" (I guess he means his company) are not knowledgeable on email, so I'd suggest outcourcing or buying a turn-key solution. Myself, I'm partial to Communigate Pro [stalker.com], but even then you need some knowledge (DNS MX records and such).

      Production email is far too important in a business to start experimenting.

      If, on the other hand, you can afford to experiment (maybe with a secondary domain), the easiest installation of Courier IMAP I did was on FreeBSD. There was a webmi
    • That's my solution.

      I've never really gone the "do it yourself" route, but I can definitely recommend my current solution. I host my mail with Critical Path [criticalpath.net] (disclaimer: I'm a former employee, so I don't exactly pay for the service).

      Besides them handling all maintenance and keeping the service up 24/7, there's IMAP, POP and webmail access. Account provisioning is easy through their web admin interface or through an API. And they've got all sorts of feature I don't really need for my personal email (LDAP

  • Courier is Great (Score:4, Informative)

    by JLester ( 9518 ) on Tuesday September 09, 2003 @08:31PM (#6916433)
    We've been using Courier for a couple of years now. We run several thousand users through it using Courier's POP3 and IMAP servers, Squirrelmail, and LDAP integration for all the user accounts. We've never had a single problem with it.

    Jason

    • Re:Courier is Great (Score:3, Insightful)

      by wmshub ( 25291 )
      I've been using courier for about 4 years now. Works great, very easy to set up, supports maildir so I've used it with both qmail and postfix, works well with both.

      The only problem I had is mentioned by another person in this thread - it treats "}" as a needs-to-be-quoted char, which is incorrect. That means that if you have a "}" in your password (as I did at one time), and your mail client only quotes when needed (as the newer evolutions do), you won't be able to log in. I submitted a 1-line patch for th
    • We're using Courier and it's been wonderful. It also has SSL components such as Courier-SSL which work nicely if you want your email to make it to your inbox nice 'n safe :-)
  • The big problem that I have with Cyrus is that account administration is a pain in the butt. It would be really nice to be able to give someone a web-based tool to create accounts and change passwords.

  • QMail + Courier + Maildir (Score:4, Informative)

    by demmegod ( 620100 ) on Tuesday September 09, 2003 @08:35PM (#6916457)
    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.
    • Also, Squirrelmail plugs right into this architecture (I know, I run it, as do my friends). Throw a little OpenSSL goodness at it, and you have secure webmail on top of a very stable IMAP/SMTP platform. Judicious use of reiserfs will also provide big wins with large Maildirs.
    • Postfix works great with Courier and Maildir. I use both with virtual maps, and user/password authentication in MySQL.

      It was pretty easy to set up and there has never been a problem with it. I run Cyrus on another server, but the installation with SASL can really be a pain in the ass!

      Cyrus has got one great thing, and that is it's integration with the Sieve filtering language. Once you start using server side filters with IMAP, you will wonder however you managed without!
    • You can use different mailbox format with uw-imap. We use "mbx" which works just fine with more than one imap process accessing a folder. Multiple access is only a problem with "unix" format folders and that format is only there to be compatible with other mail tools if needed. Unless your uses want to run elm or something like that, no worries.
  • I'm using Cyrus on a Mandrake box for my home, comes with the mandrake distro, easy to setup, and the entire family can use it. Just using fetchmail to pop accounts, and imap to serve it. Then turn on Spam Assassian, and your set.

    Only problem I have, is Cyrus IMAP doesnt delete folders. Works with outlook express and thunderbird/mozilla.

  • From someone actually using Gentoo in production (Score:5, Informative)

    by Sevn ( 12012 ) on Tuesday September 09, 2003 @08:48PM (#6916510) Homepage Journal
    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 [gentoo.org]

    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!

    • Code listing 3.2: Courier-imap configuration

      # cd /etc/courier-imap // If you want to use the ssl capabilities of courier-imap or pop3, // you'll need to create certs for this purpose. // This step is recommended. If you do not want to use ssl, skip this step.
      # nano -w pop3d.cnf
      # nano -w imapd.cnf // Change the C, ST, L, CN, and email parameters to match your server.
      # mkpop3dcert
      # mkimapdcert

      This is a perfect example of what I'm having difficulties with. I don't understand what to do when he says, "Change t

      • :)

        The C,ST,L, and CN variables are in the file. Just jump in. Once you look at the file, it will become painfully obvious that those are variables for your city, state, and whatnot. I think they have Newyork, NY in there already as an example and you just have to overwrite their example.

  • Managing Imap (Score:4, Informative)

    by newfoundry ( 559985 ) on Tuesday September 09, 2003 @08:53PM (#6916536) Homepage
    Needing answers to the same question, yesterday i bought a copy of this book: Managing Imap [oreilly.com] 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 [stalker.com]. 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)

  • UW-IMAPD (Score:5, Informative)

    by blate ( 532322 ) on Tuesday September 09, 2003 @09:11PM (#6916681)
    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.

    Plusses:

    o Absolutely dirty simple to set up -- no config files, no settings, just dump the port on, add a line to /etc/inetd.conf, and you're good to go
    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.

    • 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

      Why do people always say this? Isn't this why we created PAM? AFAIK, uw-imapd supports PAM fully, and will rely on whatever modules are in the chain. If you don't want to require user accounts for mail on the box, use another method of authentication--possibly exporting the users via LDAP, and using pam_ldap. But that's just one of a number of
      • If you use pam to auth against an external box, you still need some sort of unix acccount for the uid info. We use pam and wu-imap with pam_krb5 to auth against our active directory server. Each user has a unix account and home dir (with locked password).
    • "FreeBSD 5.0 system"

      "means running a production-quality, bullet-proof OS"

      Totally, honeybunch, whch is why you should maybe have pointed out that you're running an unstable version of FreeBSD at the moment. The 5.x branch isn't going to have a stable until 5.2...

  • Other factors to consider (Score:5, Informative)

    by ChaseTec ( 447725 ) <chase@osdev.org> on Tuesday September 09, 2003 @09:18PM (#6916722) Homepage
    What other properties are you looking for in your email server? For my domains(osdev.org [osdev.org] and variants) here's the combination I use:
    • 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.

    • I have the same combination as you do, above.

      The most important reason to choose Maildir, for me, was that it is easy to make incremental backups: you only need to backup the new files. I have a couple of large mail accounts, and this keeps the storage space needed for backups (CD-RW) low. No need to do diff, and if ever a CD goes awry, I only lose the mail on that CD.

      I have been playing with cyrus Imap server, but I have a hard time setting it up, with pam and all. Yet, if you have a large stie, and don'
      • I have been playing with cyrus Imap server, but I have a hard time setting it up, with pam and all. Yet, if you have a large stie, and don't want a unix account for every user, it may be the way to go.

        Courier-IMAP lets you authenticate by just about any means you see fit. System, userdb, LDAP, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and probably more. So you don't need to have unix accounts for every user - just one virtual account to own all the mail of your virtual users.

        • Courier-IMAP lets you authenticate by just about any means you see fit. System, userdb, LDAP, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and probably more.

          FWIW, Courier-IMAP's (for that matter, all of Inter7's stuff including vpopmail) LDAP support is crappy at best. It didn't help that I am not an LDAP expert...but their support staff wasn't able to help much with it either.

          Don't get me wrong, the folks at Inter7 are fine people, who released a suite of fine products...but don't expect miracles from their LDAP stuff -- in

          • We're running several thousand users on OpenLDAP and Courier under Debian. It has worked flawlessly for us.

            Jason

            • Like I said, I'm not an LDAP expert (by any stretch of the imagination). I had some setup problems and placed a support call. They were unable to help me get it up and running (they said that thir LDAP developer was no longer with the company, and there was not anyone there to help me with LDAP-specific issues).

              Further, because they could not support it, they recommended against using it. In the enterprise, I go by the rule of support. If there is no commercial support available for a package, you nee

  • Cyrus or Dovecot (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Rheingold ( 2741 )

    I use Cyrus in a number of my packaged configurations [nakedape.cc], but for ease of migration and security Dovecot [procontrol.fi] seems promising, although it lacks many of the advanced features that Cyrus has. It would probably be helpful to know exactly how many users you'll be serving and what your mail volume is. You might drop by #cyrus on irc.freenode.net and chat with people there.

    You could, of course, look around and hire a Linux consultant [nakedape.cc] to set it up for you.

  • BSD-based solution with a big support community (Score:4, Informative)

    by gregwbrooks ( 512319 ) * <gregb AT west-third DOT net> on Tuesday September 09, 2003 @10:09PM (#6917045)
    I've been using Matt Simerson's free "mail toaster" [tnpi.biz] for a few years and it gets better with every update:

    • Rock-solid FreeBSD base
    • qmail + CourierIMAP + qmailadmin (for easy web-based admin of e-mail accounts) + tie-ins to tarpitting, SpamAssassin or other anti-UCE measures
    • Very secure -- Matt has set the whole thing up to be more secure than what most users would configure on their own. E-mail accounts don't have corresponding system accounts, POP-before-SMTP is enabled and a host of other lock-down measures are in place.
    • Works with both IMAP and traditional POP services
    • Comes with either SquirrelMail [squirrelmail.org] or SqWebMail [inter7.com] as a default webmail client, although I've gotten it to work with Horde's Imp [horde.org] project as well.

    I know you spec'd Gentoo, but this is a great solution backed by an active user community/e-mail list. It's worth a look.

  • Want flashy? Gentoo. Want reliability? OpenBSD. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Telent ( 567982 ) <telent@mordac.iOPENBSDnfo minus bsd> on Tuesday September 09, 2003 @10:10PM (#6917060)
    For that volume, if you want "set it and forget it reliability"...

    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.

  • First I like the outsourcing option that was mentioned.

    Aside from that I am using Cyrus IMAP + Postfix on 2 servers running Gentoo Linux. The minimal install is pretty easy aside from the SASL stuff. Nicholas Petrele has a nice series on setting up CYRUS IMAP starting here [linuxworld.com]. He also mentions Communigate Pro which isn't free but the trade for a no brainer install and maintenance might be worth the purchase price.

    CYRUS is nice since you don't have to create system accounts, just IMAP accounts. It's als

  • That's what we settled on. The entire rest of our world is Apple [apple.com] PowerBooks [apple.com], iBooks [apple.com] and Gentoo [gentoo.org] boxen (except the internal web server -- it's an old RedHat [redhat.com] machine).

    We tried and tried and tried all the other IMAP servers, since we had to support Outlook XP, only UW-IMAP seemed to work with TLS and Outlook.

    I would not want to run Gentoo on my mailserver. I want fast, fire and forget. I love Gentoo and OS X on my G4 PowerBook [apple.com], on my desktop and even in the server and testbed farms.

    Not email.

    Not for

    • It stores mailfolders in a single file, i.e. a folder named INBOX is just a file called INBOX, and the Sent folder is a file called Trash.

      While this may be OK for simple mail storage, it also means that simple things such as subfolders is out of the question (thus making it virtually impossible to work with for people like me, and NO I will not resort to naming folders something like mailinglists-mailinglist1 :)

      At home I use Cyrus IMAP without any trouble whatsoever. As far as Outlook XP is concerned, al

  • UW-IMAP (Score:3, Informative)

    by autarkeia ( 152712 ) on Wednesday September 10, 2003 @01:13AM (#6918499) Homepage

    I have tried over and over again to switch to Cyrus from UW-IMAP and have finally decided that I have no need to do so. UW-IMAP is written by the guy who wrote the IMAP protocol, Mark Crispin. For all means and purposes it is the definitive IMAP server. It is extremely simple to setup, can scale up to tens of thousand of users, and supports every mailbox type you can think of. It also supports SSL with very little configuration. The O'Reilly IMAP book is a good guide to it (and to IMAP in general).

    The one thing you really must keep in mind with UW-IMAP is not to use MBOX. The MBX format, on the other hand, is high-performance and very powerful. The maintainers of UW-IMAP have kept MBOX as the default for years now, but once you get past about 50MB of mail in a given folder you end up with problems.

    My advice is to look through ALL of the docs to learn how to modify the source code. The docs are scattered in random places but they do contain most of the info you need to become a relative expert in UW-IMAP.

    All in all I am very happy with UW-IMAP. I have been running it on Gentoo forever now (though I don't emerge it, I compile it myself) alongside Sendmail and Procmail and have never, ever, ever had a problem with it. Months of uptime, broken only my physical server moves...

  • Buy a turnkey solution. One platform that I have had lots of luck with is Mirapoint [mirapoint.com]. They have boxes to fill every need from small boxes up to large enterprise installations. When I worked at Cisco they had over half their email on Mirapoint boxes. They had a few IMAP issues several years ago but after I gave them the problem description, client software information, and a reference to where they were not following the RFC's they came out with a patch in fairly short order.

  • A good one (Score:3, Funny)

    by RzUpAnmsCwrds ( 262647 ) on Wednesday September 10, 2003 @01:51AM (#6918695)
    Microsoft Exchange

    What... why is everyone looking at me like that?

  • not quite what you asked for but, (Score:3, Informative)

    by Alex ( 342 ) on Wednesday September 10, 2003 @03:11AM (#6918999)
    Have you considered Suse Open Exchange [suse.co.uk]?

    I'd keep all of the exchange zealots happy, and is significantly cheaper than exchange.

    (I don't work for Suse)

    Alex
  • I found myself in a similar situation to yours a few weeks back - no real interest/expertise with email, but I had to get an IMAP email server working fast.

    I used Postfix on top of Mandrake, and put Courier on top of that. It works fine; there was no significant setup required; it worked straight "out of the box" and hasn't missed a beat since.

    Others might be better - I didn't check - but Courier is certainly good enough for me based on this one experience with it
  • I work for a major university with seven campuses and email supported centrally.

    We currently support 180,000 users across 6 four way sparcs. We are somewhere close to 2 TB of mail data. We've been running with an average of 1 unscheduled downtime per year over the past five years.

    We use sendmail + cyrus, with a few minor modications. We have no plans to move away from the cyrus imap server.

    Cyrus (once set up) is a dream to take care of. Writing scripts to handle mailbox administration is done in perl (pr
  • We run Courier on FreeBSD and Debian for our non-Exchange accounts. All of the servers really do have their own merit. I'd give you a lot of good reasons, but they really end with "it's the one we picked." Not a ringing endorsement, huh? But we are very happy with it (plus Exim + Squirrelmail + Spamassassin).

    Here's two good guides:

    http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200308/courier-imap . ht ml

    http://talk.trekweb.com/~jasonb/articles/exim_ma il dir_imap.shtml

    Both are easy to follow, and managing the mail store is
  • UW-IMAP is great, if you're running a small organization and like to run garbage.

    Try anything that supports the Maildir format, like qmail or Courier-IMAP. At my current job, we use qmail for SMTP, POP, and IMAP, and it works well. I don't really like it, but it gets the job done.

    At my old job, we used Courier-IMAP and Postfix. This matches my at-home setup pretty closely, but they one-upped it by using the IMP webmail client, available at www.horde.org [horde.org] along with a whole slew of other web-based apps.

  • This combination works well for small organizations; I use it and have set it up for clients under Red Hat, and would be happy to help [sunsetsystems.com].

    I love and use Gentoo on my own desktop, but it's a bit too bleeding-edge for a mail server.

  • When it comes to IMAP servers, there is a near inverse relationship between setup simplicity vs. the ability to handle large amounts of users and mails.

    The simplest IMAP servers (e.g. UW-IMAPD) use the traditional BSD mailbox format (Your INBOX is a single file in /var/spool/mail/$USER, other mailboxes are single files in $HOME/Mail). The most common mail delivery agents (sendmail, exim, postfix, procmail...) all use this format by default.

    The problem is that storing all your mail in a single file is not
  • I used before WebMail [zope.org] (which has temporary maintanance problems) and PloneWebMail [1000asa.com] (which is actively developed and has very promising architectural features).

    If you love scripting and programming with the way your mail is displayed and organized you will love to read your IMAP mail in Zope [zope.org] and especially in Plone [plone.org].

  • IAAEA... (Score:2, Informative)

    by jimmydigital ( 267697 )
    (I am an email administrator)

    Here is the mix you want... though you didn't say how your user info is stored.. so I'll assume ldap.

    - Postfix with ldap lookup tables for mail routing

    - amavis-new with spamassin + sql (or ldap) for
    per user white/black lists and scoring

    - cyrus imap taking delivery via lmtp from postfix
    and running saslauthd against whatever sort of
    backend you have to authenticate users (flat
    file,ldap,sql)

    - Squirrelmail for webmail

    - up-imapproxy to soften the blow caused by any
    webmail s
  • e-smith [e-smith.org] is a free distro based on Red Hat but managed via web browser and a powerful set of script templates. Thus it's trivially easy to set up and manage (I've set up office admins in non-profit human service organizations, likely the least techie environment outside of field hands, and they've had no problems managing their servers).

    Currently version 6 is in beta, probably to be released real-soon-now, and it includes the dovecot [procontrol.fi] IMAP server. This is proving to be a champ of an IMAP server, particularl

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