Miquel van Smoorenburg wrote:
> In article <3FCB5B82.4050404@???>, Marc Perkel
> <marc@???> wrote:
>
>> So - is there any other solutions out there that do something like
>> this? I need virtual domains. I need to run it off 1 ip address.
>> What are other people doing for multiple domains?
>
>
> A solution not many people know about is dovecot. It supports IMAP
> and POP3, mbox and maildir, is secure, and builds an index of the
> mailbox. Because of that it is really fast.
>
> http://dovecot.procontrol.fi/
>
> Latest version is 0.99.10.4, I'm running that and it works quite
> well.
>
> Mike.
>
>
What constitutes 'best', of course depends on the intended use and
individual preferences, especially w/r ease of installation and
maintenance thereafter, but ...
...Having spent a good deal of time over the past two years trialing
various combinations, my 'finalist' for SMTP/ESMTP is overwhelmingly
Exim. Nothing else is as flexible or well documented. Steep learning
curve, but a road well-paved with plentiful examples from lots of
helpful folks on this list and elsewhere, so one that pays off in
unparallelled flexibility.
W/R IMAP/POP, my two surviving contenders are:
- courier-imap (which includes imap, imap-ssl, pop3d, pop3d-ssl)
- Dovecot (which also has a pop daemon and either GNU or Open SSL/TLS).
Courier is 'mostly' Maildir oriented, and Sam has some clever built-ins
for herirarchical folders withn Maildirs as well as shared and group
Maildirs that can be used for groupworking and BB or group news
features. His IMAP 'outbox' provides a convenient method of hand-of to a
server-resident SMTPD when a client is otherwise blocked from access by
ISP's who permit only their own SMTP service.
His full package, courier-mta, OTOH, I found just too bloody demanding
w/r installation and configuration details to ever want to install on
more than one box <G>.
Dovecot already handles both mailbox and maildir but also modularizes
the code for accessing mail storage, which should make it easier to
interface to either a DB-indexed (a la PowerMail) or DB-resident (a la
DBMail) mail store - and the author points that out, so Timo is clearly
not 'married' to Maildir OR Mailbox format.
I have Exim working to either/both Maildirs with courier-imap/pop3 or
DB-storage with DBMail+PostgreSQL, (DBMail's own IMAP and POP seem to be
broken, at least W/R FreeBSD 4.X),
- and will be returning to Dovecot trials this week in hopes of being
able to use one form or another of DB backend more easily. This may or
may not be a good fit for a University or an ISP, but makes quite good
sense for dedicated serving of SME intranet applications using
'community' or group tools such as Zope/Plone, Twiki, Drupal, etc. where
the client base is small, a DB is in-place anyway, single-registration
and single-sign-on is desirable, and corporate policy/govt regulations
require archiving of both inbound and outbound traffic *anyway* [1].
YMMV
Bill Hacker
[1] Flak about fascism aside, corporations in general have *long* had
responsibility to preserve their records and correspondence for ca 7 years.
With a DB-resident mail store, a user's 'delete' can simple set a flag
that sez: 'don't show it to ME any longer', but basic DB backup still
preserves all traffic, moreover, in its useful form, (vis a 'bigbrother'
log tarball, which is not all that easy to search). DBMail, to name one,
does not actually delete a deleted record, flag or no. That is done by a
separate maintenance activity, which can be modified.....
