Re: Recommended IMAP server

From: wkearney99 (wkearney99_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 11/25/05 

Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2005 11:33:48 -0500

> Sounds good. I run exim (3) here, too. (I'm gradually migrating to
> exim4.)

As opposed to postfix?

> Would definitely recommend fetchmail if you have to collect email from a
> POP3/IMAP mailbox. Direct SMTP is to be preferred though.

+1 on fetchmail, it's very convenient for pulling mail from what might be
more than one remote account all for local reading out of the imap store. I
use it to pull a bunch of mail from several different accounts and then
deliver it into local "Inbox-servicename" folders. That way I can still
tell to which account it was delivered. True, I don't get "you've got new
mail" on all the separate folders but I can live with that.

> Squirrelmail works nicely with dovecot, as do the mail clients you've
named.

Take a look at IlohaMail. I find it quite a bit faster than SquirrelMail.
It's barebones 'just mail' but it works well. Their 0.9.0 development
version is quite stable.

> > Integration with Spam Assassin (or another spam filter) is essential
> Absolutely.

+1 and then some.

> > as is an easy way for users to interact with the spam filter.

This complicates the setup somewhat but it is possible. There may be
additional complications with providing per-user spam filter setups for the
virtual users.

> > Integration with ClamAV is essential, as is being able to add my own
> > filters (for example, I have a policy of stripping all exe files,
> > including pif, scr, etc., from incoming emails).

Those are generally good rules server-wide. If folks need executables I let
the server pass zip archives and then scan those.

> > I also need to be able to sanitise html emails to remove javascript, and
> > that sort of thing. I realise that's not part of the IMAP server as
> > such, but I need the server to be able to integrate easily this sort of
> > filter.
> No idea.

Trying to strip the HTML mail is quite a bit of a mess. I've found it was
simpler to switch to a mail client that automatically defaulted to NOT
showing the message as HTML. Most do this in their latest versions. HTML
is such a rats nest, along with MIME, that it's truly a difficult to make a
filter than handles all cases properly.

> I tried cyrus, but couldn't even get it to work properly. (Why /should/
> I have to understand the guts of SASL?)

No ***, it's a unbelievably annoying how poorly documented it is in places.
Most of the online HOWTO documents are woefully out of date. The syntax
they suggest just doesn't work on the most recent versions. I've gotten it
working here but it's taken an inordinately large amount of work.

> Both it and Courier seem to
> provide a complete IMAP solution, which is a pain if it doesn't seem to
> do exactly what you want. On the other hand, it's a right pain running
> sieve or even exim filters with dovecot - I gave up on that idea.

I wanted server-side filtering with virtual users and that pretty much
spells out sieve using cyrus-imapd.

-Bill Kearney