Re: need information on IMAP with sendmail

On Sat, 23 Feb 2013, Bruce Ferrell wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm new here and I've been trying to setup an imap server for use with my 
> sendmail/mbox installation.  I've been using sendmail with pop3 for over 10 
> years.  All of the instructions I've read seem to imply that I have to use 
> maildir.  Is my understanding correct?  If not, can you point me to 
> documantation that explains why I might certain settings over others vs "just 
> do this and never mind what they do... It will work".  I prefer to understand 
> what I'm setting up.
>
> Thanks in advance

pop & imap are both protocols for reading email. sendmail (as a MTA) is
a program for sending, transmitting, and indirectly delivering mail.
The only point in common that pop/imap have with sendmail is the mailstore
(mailbox, mbx, mbox, maildir, etc). So sendmail has to (via its delivery
agent) deliver messages into some kind of mailbox that pop/imap know how
to read & hand out to the clients.

So you pick some kind of mailstore (mailbox format)(you probably already
have that) that your pop/imap know how to grok, pick the delivery agent
that knows how to stuff messages into that kind of mailbox, then configure
your sendmail to use that delivery agent. 'maildir' and 'mbox' are two 
different kinds of mailboxes, most pop/imapd know how to handle them
and many sendmail delivery agents know too. 'mbox' is the oldest most
universaly recognised format but has limitations. The UW-imap 'mix' format
is a bit more difficult to work with but works better with large mailboxes
(10s/100s of thousands of messages in a mailbox that is 10s of
Gigabytes in size).

The only other way that I can think of that sendmail might interact with
pop/imap is if you are using some kind of "pop-before-smtp" system to
authenticate your users to allow them to send mail. (we used something 
like that last millenium ;). Most people now use SMTP-AUTH for this
purpose but there may still be "pop-before-smtp" systems in use.
If you are one of them, you will need to figure out how to hook your
imap daemon into that system. Back in the day, we used "rpc.dracd"
and I hacked the UW imapd source code to add a call to dracd each time
a user logged into an imap session.

HTH

-- 
Dave Funk                                  University of Iowa
<dbfunk (at) engineering.uiowa.edu>        College of Engineering
319/335-5751   FAX: 319/384-0549           1256 Seamans Center
Sys_admin/Postmaster/cell_admin            Iowa City, IA 52242-1527
#include <std_disclaimer.h>
Better is not better, 'standard' is better. B{
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