[LUNI] Centralized Email Store

[lists at redboy.cx]

On Sat, 23 Nov 2002 13:01:39 -0600
Larry Garfield <lgarfiel at students.depaul.edu> wrote:

> I'm looking into setting up a similar system to that.  The catch for me 
> is that I've got a few hundred megs of mbox (Netscape / Mozilla) 
> formatted email archives that I need to keep intact. :-)  (If it can be 
> done simply, I may want to switch it to maildir on the server.)  I've 
> tried to find discussions / comparisons of the different imap servers 
> and how each works best and how to configure the mail system the way I 
> want it, but I've found little more than "here's the theory, grab the 
> source from here, comepile, and go away". :-)  Any sources you can 
> recommend?

As a matter of fact, I got a lot of information from here: http://www.whiprush.org/mailfaq/
As far as I understand, the "big three" IMAP servers are UW-IMAP, which is the "standard," then courier which is fast, flexible and fairly easy to install and configure, and Cyrus, which is large, harder to configure, but extremly powerful, especially because you can give people IMAP accounts wihtout needing for them to have actual user accounts on the server. Courier ended up being my choice, because it was very easy to get going with SSL and I'm not serving IMAP to anyone I don't know IRL. Ditto what Mr. Garner said about converting mbox to maildir. It's relatively easy, safe, and thorough, and Maildir is a much nicer format IME. 

-- 
"Y'know, there was a time when corporate responsibility meant having the decency to jump out of a window when you got caught." 
-"The Business Fundamentalist," Non-Sequiter 9/30/2002