[Gllug] Email clients and IMAP

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Sun, 2003-02-23 at 13:57, Andrew Black wrote:
> Hi
> I am pondering which email client to use on Linux.  To date I am using
> Evolution as it happens to be there on my machine.   There was some
> suggestion that it is better to store mail in a way that is independent
> of the client, and serve it via IMAP.  Also  I would like to be in a
> possition where my mail is available via a command line client (so I can
> telnet/ssh from other machines around the house and read/send mail).
> 
> So my real question is how do I go about setting up an IMAP server and
> fetching mail so it can be read this way

Short answer - download an IMAP server package, install it, configure
your MTA to deliver to the IMAP server, and then configure your email
client to talk IMAP.

Longer answer - there are several open source IMAP servers out there.
There are three you might actually want to consider - they are the
UW-IMAP server, the Cyrus IMAP server, and Courier.

UW is probably the simplest to set up. However, in the default (easy set
up config) it performs worst. To get the most out of it you need to
change the mailstore backend, which makes the setup trickier.

Courier is pretty decent. It used maildir as a backend, and so will need
some consideration on setup. Technically, it's not an IMAP server, as
the author occassionally disagrees with the IMAP standard. Where this
happens, he implements what he thinks the standard should have said, not
what it does say. Reminds me of Dan Bernstein.

Cyrus is my personal favourite, though the setup is probably more
awkward than the others. It uses its own mailstore format, so mail is
readable only via IMAP. The mailstore has numerous database files around
to speed things up, and Cyrus is a very fast and capable IMAP
implementation. You have to arrange to have mail delivered to Cyrus via
LMTP, so your MTA should speak LMTP. If it doesn't, you can use a
wrapper program, but I've had better results with native LMTP delivery.
Cyrus also offers a server side mail filtering implementation called
Sieve, which is very handy. However, it's not really sensible to try and
use procmail with Cyrus, so if you have huge procmail recipes, you need
to think carefully.

I did a GLLUG talk on IMAP some time ago, and the notes are up at
http://www.coruscant.demon.co.uk/mike/imap. The version of Cyrus these
notes cover is now outdated, you should use Cyrus 2.1.12 if setting up a
new installation now, but a lot of the information is still relevant.

As far as clients go, I personally use Evolution, Mozilla, Squirrel
Mail, and mutt, depending on where I am. Mutt doesn't support IMAP as
well as it deals with local mail spools, but the support is OK.
Evolution has fairly decent IMAP support, but some of it's threading is
broken. Mozilla is probably the best IMAP client I'm aware of at the
moment, though you'll need to change some of the less obvious
preferences to get the best out of it. By default it checks only the
inbox for new mail, which is not good when you're doing filtering on the
server. Support for IMAP quotas is also not very good.

HTH,

Mike.

P.S. There's an O'Reilly book called "Managing IMAP", which you may be
pointed at. IMHO, it's so outdated it should be considered harmful....

P.P.S. There are numerous non-free server and client implementation I'm
aware of, but I have no interest in them, so have chosen not to mention
them.


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