[ILUG] IMAP server

[Padraig Brady]

Matthew French wrote:
> 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?

yep

> 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.

spamassasin (server mode)

> 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?
> 

Definitely works fine with courier (mozilla and outlook).

> 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?

Client config may be enough here

> 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.

wrt webmail, we use IMP here

> 
> 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.

The message index (header) store I hope. Databases are a big win here,
but not for storing the whole message. Filesystems are basically 
databases tuned for 10K blobs of data.

Padraig.