Re: need information on IMAP with sendmail

On 02/23/2013 02:00 PM, David B Funk wrote:
> 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
>


Thanks for the background David.  I actually did set up pop-before-smtp on one server I take care of... It was easier for me to tell my users "you have to check your mail before 
you can send".

I do understand the the differences between MTAs, MUAs and mail delivery.

I prefer sendmail over postfix/exim and lets not get into others that shall remain nameless.

Maybe this is the wrong venue for my questions too.  This just seemed the most general venue for the topic IMAP and the differences in implementations/capabilities.

Thanks again
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