The Book of IMAP: Building a Mail Server with Courier and Cyrus, by Peer Heinlein and Peer Hartleben, is a quality resource for any serious mail administrator. The approach taken is direct, but at the same time it's very expansive, setting this book apart from most others I have read. It's packed full of rich examples which are used to solidify the topic being covered. At several places the authors reach out to explain when the subject is addressing ambiguous or otherwise undocumented information which is to great advantage to the reader and worthy of recognition.
Member since:
2007-03-04
No comment.
Back to topic. I think the problem you're exposing is that IMAP servers work with *files*. Obviously, email servers would cripple if they had to zip individual small files. And they already cripple just retrieving individual messages. How many times do we get timeout error messages from Squirrelmail when we have too many messages in an IMAP folder? The solution is retrieving relevant messages from a *database*, storing them into a temporary file (single file), zipping this file and sending it to the MUA. This would solve our problem and servers would be happy.