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On Feb 23, 2013, at 4:38 PM, Bruce Ferrell wrote:
> 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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>
Well, it's been years since I've used SuSE of any type, but there shouldn't be any reason why you can't use their package manager to install both sendmail and uw-imap at the same time -- unless they've written in those dependencies in their package manager. I used to use sendmail and uw-imap on SuSE, installing them both through their package manager like any other software.
It probably won't let you have both PostFix and Sendmail installed at the same time. When I installed Sendmail, it always removed PostFix first.
I think the Dovecot site has a page with some interesting pros and cons between maildir and mbox that you might find worth reading. The info is applicable to both dovecot and uw-imap.
Part of why I asked what OS and distribution you were using is because we've recently migrated from Linux to OpenIndiana - the open source continuation of Open Solaris, which Oracle tried to kill off shortly after acquiring Sun. I figured it'd be a long-shot that you'd be using Solaris, but they do have some extra steps you have to take if you want to use maildir on it.
Hope this helps.
Have a nice weekend!
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