On Wed, Mar 31, 2004 at 09:59:57AM EST, Aaron wrote: > How many of you out there retrieve your mail from POP3 boxes out on the > 'net, perhaps from your ISP and/or website host, and also run a local > IMAP server for reading it? That's exactly what I've been doing now for a nice long time (well over a year). > Among those of you who do, what is your selection of programs to achieve > this? Do you use UW-IMAP, Cyrus, etc.? qmail, postfix, fetchmail...? Am > I getting categories mixed up? My toolchain is external POP3 boxes (both multidrop and single drop) -> fetchmail -> sendmail -> procmail -> mboxes -> WU-IMAPd (although you can access your mboxes directly if you prefer, of course). I like mboxes because it's the most "standard" format out there, so my users can basically do their own thing (~/.procmailrc == really powerful, and procmail supports maildirs, anyway) without my policies getting in their way. I like sendmail because it's simply the most powerful MTA out there. I use fetchmail because it was the first such program I found and I don't hate it enough yet to switch to anything else. I must admit that especially in multidrop mode, it's not very easy to work with, though, so I don't think I'd recommend it to anybody else. Procmail speaks for itself, of course: it's extremely efficient, quite fast, and easy to configure, not to mention very well-supported. (Users can install their own MDA and ~/.procmailrc all their mail to it, if they want. I haven't seen anybody go that route yet, though.) As for WU-IMAPd, I like it more than Cyrus, because I find the folder layout more logical. I'm not wedded to it, though, and if my experiment with FUSE (rewriting my address book manager into a filesystem) turns out to be a success, the whole IMAPd mess is going to be replaced by a brand new daemon that'll maintain a virtual mail filesystem (similar to Plan9's mailfs) from an mbox backend. (If I feel like it, I'll also code up some Mutt support for it. (It'll be 100% reliable by design, and depending on implementation can probably be made arbitrarily efficient, since the entire mbox can theoretically be cached without race conditions.) Else, I'll just write a trivial IMAPd to feed Mutt from the virtual filesystem.) > Right now I run fetchmail to retrieve mail from 4 POP3 boxes on the > 'net, and then procmail is invoked to deliver them into the various mbox > files in my home directory (I am the only mail user). My server's living proof that not only is that strategy viable for a single-user system, but it can even be used if you expand your operations a bit. > I am considering > Maildir format because I've heard it's quicker to browse, but I > understand that if you use Cyrus, your mail is stored in their format > and it would be pointless to convert it all to Maildir first. I've heard lots of good things about the maildir format. I don't use it myself for backwards compatibility reasons, primarily. If that's not important to you, there are some rather nifty things you can do with maildirs (think temporary folders with symlinks to search results, for instance). > What is YOUR ideal configuration? Just curious. I'm pretty happy with all of my current config, but overly enthusiastic about none of it save sendmail. I only wish security updates (especially for the nasty bugs that a simple code audit should've caught ages ago) weren't so frequent :-( - Dave -- Uncle Cosmo, why do they call this a word processor? It's simple, Skyler. You've seen what food processors do to food, right? Please visit this link: http://rotter.net/israel
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