[Techtalk] imap server

[jennyw]

IMAP -- as Rasjid said, it's great to be mail client independent.  As a
result, it also means it's really easy to migrate from server to server -- 
you could do it with a simple Perl (or Python, etc.) script.

Filtering on the server -- If you're interested in this, you'll want to read
about procmail (the most popular) or maildrop (often used with Courier) or
sieve (often used with Cyrus). Personally, I use Procmail, Postfix, and
Courier (and Spamassassin) to handle my mail.  I also have a custom Perl
script that I wrote that filters on one account. I'm thinking of switching
to Python and using Spambayes instead of SpamAssassin.

Maildirs -- There are a lot of formats. Traditional Unix mail was kept in
mbox format. UW IMAP can support this, but it prefers a similarly named mbx
format, which is more efficient (and which avoids problem like only one
process being able to open the file at a time).  However, when I was running
UW IMAP, I noticed that there were big performance problems. Admittedly, I
had 100,000 messages in a folder, which is what caused the problem. When I
replaced UW with Courier, I noticed a marked speedup. I don't know if that's
a big difference between mbox and maildir or whether a difference in the
implementation, but I'm happy with the end result.

Note: If you use maildirs and have a lot of messages, it might not be a bad
idea to look into using ReiserFS which should be optimized for many small
files. Also, if you use ext2fs, you might want to make sure that you have
more than the default number of inodes allocated to the file system. I
didn't do this initially on my mail partition, and couldn't figure out why
it said the disk was full when there was a lot of space free. Turns out I
ran out of inodes (as people on LinuxChix IRC pointed out to me -- thanks
everyone!).

FYI, the kludge to get maildirs to work with UW-IMAP was pretty broken -- 
when I used it, it only worked on the inbox and not the other folders. Very
weird (this was the Debian package). This may be why it's no longer
supported.

Jen