Re: [EXIM] Q: exim and POP3 servers

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Author: Nigel Metheringham
Date:  
To: Alan Thew
CC: Exim List
Subject: Re: [EXIM] Q: exim and POP3 servers
Just to comment on Alan's results a little....

} UW ipop3d 5 sites

Probably a good choice if you need IMAP and use mbox mailboxes.
Personally I am not very happy with the UW implementations - they are too
big and knotted which makes evaluating them for security rather difficult.
My personal preference would be to use one of the other pop daemons even
if you use the uw-imap server - just make sure that locking works for all
mail systems.

} qpopper    4 sites


Used to lead the pack in features (on a pop daemon???), now its yet
another pop daemon.

} cucipop    3 sites


cucipop is fast, uses little memory, and appears secure. The user
authentication is modular - its easy to drop in a different authentication
method. The code is cryptic in the extreme but when you understand it,
appears clean. This is my pop daemon of choice if you use mbox

} qmail popd 3 sites

Only supports maildir spool format. Fast efficient, small, pretty well
written. Comes in 3 pieces - qmail-popup (deals with the authentication
dialog), checkpassword (a separate program which actually checks the
authentication data - so you can replace this with your authenticator of
choice) and qmail-pop3d (which does the normal pop things). If you have
NFS mail spool this is the only sane option (basically you can't reliably
use mbox on NFS). Freeserve uses this for a million plus users.

} cyrus popd 1 site

Cyrus is a bigger package implementing a sealed IMAP server. Generally
appears very good, although earlier versions definitely had a
delivery/locking problem with the pop server. If you are doing a proper
IMAP implementation then this is the only free (ish) one to use and hence
you are stuck with the pop server that goes with the IMAP implementation.
NB Cyrus definitely does not work over NFS - don't even try it.

    Nigel.


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