On Monday 15 October 2007 18:43:00 James Knott wrote:

When I tried Dovecot, I couldn't get it to see any of the existing subfolders under my inbox, even though uw-imap worked fine. Is there a similar issure with Cyrus?

Cyrus doesn't use your home folder at all. It sets up a separate directory hierarchy Anders -- Madness takes its toll -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Jim Flanagan wrote:

It's been a while since I tested Dovecot, but as I remember, uw-imap and Coruier read different mail box file formats. One reads mbox, the other maidir (don't remember which is which at the moment). The beauty of

UW-Imap uses mbox, Courier uses maildir format.

Dovecot is that it can be configured to read one or the other format. In Dovecot you may want to adjust this setting if you are having trouble.

In any case, all of the above read mail from /var/spool/mail. Cyrus works differently. When you set up opensuse to use Cryus imap, it will store mail in /var/spool/imap. I think it is because Cyrus imap does lots of active stuff behind the sceens in managing your mail. When you look at logs for example, there are lots of entries where cyrus imap is doing reads and other stuff to it. In practice I never notice a thing. Except for the fact that it has other benefits such as error correction. I've noticed in the past when moving a large number or emails from one folder to another (say a months or more worth of opensuse emails) uw-imap for example might get overwhelemed, and I wound up loosing some emails in the process. Since I started using Cyrus imap, this has never happened. Sometimes (agian moving large amounts of email at one time) the move process might fail, but Cyrus restores all mails to their original location. Active fault tolerance. This is one of the reasons I like Cyrus.

But, you have to set it up differently, i.e. the mail is stored in a different location and in a cyrus format than the other imap solutions. You set it up using yast, which configures all that stuff for you. It is not hard.

Cyrus is a lot more complex than it seems when you are setting it up in yast. You are right, in spite of the seemingly maildir like structure, Cyrus uses a proprietary format to store mails. Mails are stored as a file for each mail, but additionally Cyrus is keeping an index in every folder (sub-mailbox) to track mails. Other Cyrus databases are mailboxes.db -> mailboxes, folder structure, ACLs deliver.db -> duplicate suppression for delivery and vacation seen.db -> the seen state of the mails Critical is the mailboxes.db. If that database is unreadable Cyrus will refuse to work. Now, the tricky part is that the database is dependent on the version of the installed berkeley db. The other databases can be deleted if neccessary, you will only lose not-critical meta-data. Let's assume you like your data and you backup regularly. Then the hdd of your box goes south and you decide to buy a new one. You install the newest Suse version, restore the data from your backup, log into your imap server and.. uh... it doesn't seem to be running... That is why Novell by default sets up a script in /etc/cron.daily to dump a flat text file of mailboxes.db each day. My backup script is dumping also the seen state and the deliver.db to text files before a backup run. For single user installations Cyrus is mostly overkill, though some features are pretty neat. I am running squatter to get a full text index, it speeds up fulltext searches tremendously, although the index is using a lot of space. Sieve scripts for serverside filtering are also very nice. Courier and Dovecot on the other hand use normal maildir format, backup and restore is done by copying the files. You can also use a script to remove files without breaking the imap server. If someone does not have any experience with imap servers I would suggest Dovecot, it is a very active project, the server has left beta state in the recent time. -- Sandy List replies only please! Please address PMs to: news-reply2 (@) japantest (.) homelinux (.) com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Lew Wolfgang wrote:

I've been using wu-imap since the early '90s and have been told numerous times about how bad it is. Say what you will about the mbox format, but its big advantage is the files are all ascii. This means they can be grepped and fiddled with outside of the imap system. I once considered one of

No difference to maildir format in that regard. All mails have to survive the transfer across various servers, so basically all mails are transfered as text. Even attachments are converted to ascii text for that reason. This does not mean that they are easily accessable with grep since they are often mime encoded. Just think about all the languages that are not compatible with ascii.

the other systems that uses maildir format, but chickened out because I didn't want all of our 50 or so accounts being stored in a database format. This smelled too much like MS Exchange for me.

Uhm, IIRC, Exchange is using one file for each mailbox. Domino is doing the same. In other words, much like mbox. (^-^) If we are talking about Cyrus this is at least partially true, though the mails are still stored as simple files in folders. A real database appliance would be something like dbmail where even the mails themselves are stored in in a mysql database.

I also don't recall ever loosing mail due to wu-imap, but am willing to hear reasons to change. Has anyone ever had

There are some good reasons for maildir: - performance: If you have a LOT of mails in a mbox file it takes a lot of time to scan the mbox for changes. The bigger the mbox files, the more users you've got, the more you will feel this. When you've got powerusers that have nurtured their mailboxes to sizes of 10 GB upwards and you expect your server to respond in a timely fashion you will have to use maildir. (^-^) - deliver security: mbox has a long history of locking problems. This mostly affects bigger installations, where the mbox files are stored on shared network devices and several services might try to access the files. Maildir has no trouble at all if ten mails are delivered in parallel to the same mailbox at the same time. The longer a process has to lock the mbox file for exclusive write access the bigger the change that another process will be blocked and delivery is deferred. - folder structure With maildir you can use a folder structure to sort your mail on your server. - backup: Backup and restore can be done on changed mails only. When you have single mbox files you have backup the entire file if just one mail has been added or deleted. Again, no problem with locking during backup. All these arguments are valid even for middle-sized installations though you might not experience these problems on a small installation.

problems with the maildir format? Do tools outside of the imap daemon exist for manipulation of the data? Are maildir systems compatible with "pine"? Yes, we still have pine users.

If pine can use pop or imap? Sure. -- Sandy List replies only please! Please address PMs to: news-reply2 (@) japantest (.) homelinux (.) com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org