Re: [exim] Suggested POP3 Server

Aaron Crosman wrote:

> I've been running Exim happily for several months for mailman. I now
> have a request to setup an POP3 server on the machine to exchange mail
> with another application coming into use. Having never used a POP3 or
> IMAP server before I'm not sure how to pick the best to work with Exim.
> I found a reference in the archive from over a year ago about this
> issue, but I want to make sure I'm taking the latest advice. Anyone
> have a strong recommendations for or against any particular POP3
> servers? FOSS would be nice, but not essential.
>
> Thanks
> Aaron
>

We have used both courier-IMAP and Dovecot with Exim (and tried bincimap
with little joy).

- Both are coureir-imap and Dovecot are F/OSS.

- Both include POP.

- Both can work with essentially all known sources of user lists, from
system password files to various Db's and *SQL.

- Courier is essentially a Maildir-only package, though it is flexible
enough to be interfaced to MBoxen with third-party code.

- Dovecot can inherently handle Maildirs and several other storage
formats, and can mix them for different users/groups or domains.
Likewise selectable auth procedures.

The current release of Dovecot seems much easier than courier to
configure in general, and *very much* easier to configure/integrate
with *SQL. Just three lines in dovecot-*sql.conf set the DB connector,
DB-driven login, DB-driven storage.

I personally also prefer Dovecot's ability to automagically create
Maildir folders that do NOT have to appear as subfolders of 'INBOX', as
it has always gone against my sense of reasonability to have an
'INBOX.trash', 'INBOX,drafts', and such, when I want Inbox, Drafts, Trash.

In use, we have Exim set to create the Maildir directory if the user is
in the DB, but has no directory (yet).

Dovecot, on first use as IMAP, will find that directory and populate it
with IMAP folders and such. 'maildirmake' is not needed.

Procedure, for us, is to set up the user, domain, passwords, storage
type and location, in the DB, then send that account a welcome message.

The welcome message triggers Exim to create the Maildir, Dovecot does
the rest on first access as either POP or IMAP.

It doesn't get a lot easier than that.....

HTH,

Bill Hacker