Oh the vexed question of pop servers....
For mbox format there is quite a choice of servers.
Lots of people use qualcomm popper. I found real problems with this if
people sent *large* messages because it always makes an extra working copy
of the mailbox - and can leave these copies hanging around if it faults at
all. It can be quite a resource hog in general.
My preference is for cucipop. This is a neat small package from the guy
who wrote procmail. Its not fully free (but licensing is cheap) - you
need to read the license. It does not create huge extra files, and is
pretty light on memory. It is good at mailbox locking. The
authentication is modular - you can add your own auth code easily. Its
fast.
ftp://ftp.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/pub/packages/cucipop
[NB my experience was with 1.14 and previous, I assume that the current
versions are just as good]
The UW IMAP server is also widely used. I live in fear of it - I find the
whole system incomprehensible, poorly documented, big, fat and running as
root. Other people do not share my opinion. As an IMAP implementation,
unless you change from mbox format, it will suffer in performance due to
the mailbox format.
All mbox implementations suffer from the problem that you have to read the
whole mbox to pick out the messages on startup - so on some systems a huge
mailbox file will cause you to get pop timeouts.
Cyrus is a good system. For a single setup its very good, you cannot
scale it across NFS (you can't do this safely with mbox either - its just
the reason why I don't use it). It does use its own format mail spool -
which gives it good performance by optomising the layout for the data
needed for IMAP. If you want IMAP its the best implementation I know of.
It is again not free software
http://andrew2.andrew.cmu.edu/cyrus/imapd/
There is also a fully commercial derivative - Simeon [Long ago the UK
academic mob were talking licenses with ESYS - might be worth talking to
JNT/CHEST whoever if you are in this position]
http://www.esys.ca/
[There are many others - most of which I have not fiddled with.
Personally I use cucipop on small systems, Cyrus on a few, qmail's popper
on big systems]
Nigel.
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[ Nigel.Metheringham@??? - Systems Software Engineer ]
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[ Real life is but a pale imitation of a Dilbert strip ]
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