From: John P. Looney (jplooney-ilug at domain online.ie)
Date: Wed 16 Feb 2000 - 14:59:11 GMT
On Wed, Feb 16, 2000 at 02:46:20PM -0000, Ricardo Letosa mentioned:
> I don't actually know anything about IMAP, only that messages are
> kept on the server. Does anybody know about it? Is it safe? Is the IMAP
> daemon easy to configure? Any issue I should be aware of? Thank you all in
> advance,
It's quite good for distributed mail systems, with multiple clients/OSes
on the client side.
It's "quite" safe. By default, usernames/passwords are still sent over
the network in plaintext, though commerical IMAP servers do use SSL. There
are three primary IMAP servers for the free software world:
UW-IMAP. Big, bloated, the original. Dead easy to configure. Can be
hacked to support Maildir.
Courier-IMAP not very much used, but very good. Uses it's own "Maildir+"
format to store messages. I like it a lot.
Cyrus IMAP - as developed by Carnegie Mellon University for serverly
large userbases. Works quite well.
IMAP rocks. If you are exporting mail directories over NFS, and someone
wants to read mail 1083 in their mailbox, the whole mailbox is sent over
the network. If a mail is deleted/moved to another mailbox, the changed
mailboxes have to be sent over the network. IMAP gets rid of all this
messing around. Microsoft Exchange and Solstice Internet Mail Server are
two IMAP-aware mail servers from the commerical world, and have loads of
cool things like "Someone sends a mail with a 2MB attachment to a hundred
people - the mail is copied two hundred times, into each persons mailbox,
but the attachment is stored just once, and linked to the peoples
mailboxes". It's a bit mad.
I use "mutt" to talk to our IMAP server, and it can be used with
Exchange. etc too. Warning - though Microsoft would have you believe that
Outlook in it's various incarnation is an IMAP client - it's not.
Connecting to an IMAP server that's not a Microsoft one can corrupt
locally stored mail, and the odd time hang Outlook for no reason.
Kate
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