Star Book Review: The Book of IMAP
Linked by Jon Jensen on Tue 26th Aug 2008 02:53 UTC, submitted by Ryan Masters
Internet & Networking 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.
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phoenix
Member since:
2005-07-11

1. It's slow. It wasn't designed for our gigabyte email accounts. When I have to sync my computer with my server, it syncs one mail after the other.


You're measuring the usage of a single IMAP client with a single IMAP server, and complaining that everything related to IMAP sucks? Yeah, that makes sense.

GMail uses IMAP over SSL, so you have an encryption/decryption process on top of the transport., slowing things down, depending on your CPU.

You don't specify which IMAP client you are using. Accessing GMail from KMail is nice and snappy, as KMail does multi-threaded message downloads/folder syncs.

Perhaps you should investigate other IMAP clients?

I have hundreds of thousands of email, it takes a huge amount of time. It should create a single zipped file of the headers and send it to my computer, it would be much faster than unzipped individual files. With numerous three-way TCP/IP connections, syncing with IMAP is just too slow.


I have 400 MB in my GMail account. Connecting to it from a brand new PC takes less than 5 sec to bring up the inbox (only new messages) and less than a minute to bring up the archive (just under 10,000 messages).

IOW, get a better IMAP client.

2. Remote search is weak. Even with Dovecot. Try performing an advanced search and not only is it slow but often you don't get what you're searching because your IMAP server doesn't index attachments, sometimes it only searches headers and discards bodies.


Get a better IMAP server. Remote search against Cyrus servers is very fast, even against my 1.5 GB work account. I can search the body of all my messages in under 5 minutes, the headers in under 1. Gotta love that server-side indexing.

Zimbra's Cyrus implementation in their OSS version is also quite speedy. And their Network edition is even faster.

3. No support for tags. While some MUA and webmails now migrated from folders to tags or labels, IMAP still uses folders, so for instance in Gmail I have "Projects" and "To do" tags, if a message has both labels, in IMAP it is physically duplicated.


Can't comment on this, as I don't use tagging in any of my IMAP clients.

4. No support for calendar/address book/RSS. I know IMAP is not a calendar server application but nowadays, many MUAs have calendar, RSS and address book integrated and it's essential to be able to sync a calendar, feeds and an address book without the need to set up an LDAP server.


Get a better IMAP server. For instance, Kolab uses Cyrus IMAP to store e-mail, contacts, and calendars in IMAP folders.

5. Be in par with new needs. IMAP should offer all one expects from a mail protocol these days.


It does. Since when is calendars considered part of a "mail" protocol? Or even a "message" protocol"? ;)

Edited 2008-08-26 23:20 UTC

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