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