Linked by Jon Jensen on Tue 26th Aug 2008 02:53 UTC, submitted by Ryan Masters
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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RE[3]: My rants with the IMAP protocol and IMAP servers
by phoenix on Wed 27th Aug 2008 15:54
in reply to "RE[2]: My rants with the IMAP protocol and IMAP servers"
Member since:2005-07-11
"I can search the body of all my messages in under 5 minutes, the headers in under 1. Gotta love that server-side indexing.
This is a huge amount of time. Searching messages on a web-based forum takes one second. I shouldn't expect an IMAP server to be slower. In both cases you're searching for a phrase in a list of messages. The IMAP server architecture makes the whole process slow. Five minutes is way too much to wait for. "
Well, to each their own. I don't consider 5 minutes to search through several hundred thousand messages, and 1.5 GB of mixed text/binary data to be a long time. Maybe it's because I run my searches in the background while doing other things. Especially when you consider our IMAP server is also the webmail interface (squirrelmail), and is only a 1.6 GHz Opteron system with 4 GB of RAM, server just under 1500 users, about 500-ish logged in concurrently.
If we split that out into separate IMAP, web, auth, etc systems, and put in multiple CPUs and more RAM, the search time would drop. But, for now, we don't need it.
"Get a better IMAP server. For instance, Kolab uses Cyrus IMAP to store e-mail, contacts, and calendars in IMAP folders.
Thunderbird also has an extension that uses folders to store this information but I disagree with this practice. Folders should be used only for messages, and I would use one single large folder in the first place, each message would be labeled and indexed. "
So, do you want a groupware server that does everything, or do you want an IMAP server that just does mail? Make up your mind.
"It does. Since when is calendars considered part of a "mail" protocol? Or even a "message" protocol"? 
Since when people started using email, calendar, address book and collaboration tools at the same time in the same application (this is why Zimbra, Lotus Notes and MS Outlook are so popular in companies). Needs are evolving and IMAP needs to extend its functionalities to meet these needs, especially for companies. "
See above.
Zimbra, Lotus Notes, Exchange, and other similar groupware servers don't use IMAP for everything. In fact, they don't use IMAP for anything except access to mail folders from non-native clients. They each use their own custom protocol to communicate between the client and the server. You can't compare these to standard IMAP servers.
The Zimbra client, for example, communicates with the Zimbra server using SOAP calls for everything (mail, contacts, calendar, documents, notes, etc). However, they also provide an IMAP interface to the message store, an iCal interface to the calendars, a WebDAV interface to the documents storage, and an LDAP interface to the global addressbook.
IMAP is for accessing messages, nothing more. And it does that quite nicely. You just have to use the right server and client (especially the right server).
For examples of how to do IMAP wrong, just look at the FirstClass server, and MS Outlook.
RE[4]: My rants with the IMAP protocol and IMAP servers
by Liquidator on Wed 27th Aug 2008 20:32
in reply to "RE[3]: My rants with the IMAP protocol and IMAP servers"
Member since:2007-03-04
I don't consider 5 minutes to search through several hundred thousand messages, and 1.5 GB of mixed text/binary data to be a long time. Maybe it's because I run my searches in the background while doing other things.
I don't know any reaonable company that would accept it. My Gmail that I use for personal purpose does this job in half a second with the web-based interface.
Even if we want to limit IMAP strictly to email purpose, it still has the huge problem of lack of scalability. IMAP server are too slow when you reach a critical size.
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Member since:
2007-03-04
This is a huge amount of time. Searching messages on a web-based forum takes one second. I shouldn't expect an IMAP server to be slower. In both cases you're searching for a phrase in a list of messages. The IMAP server architecture makes the whole process slow. Five minutes is way too much to wait for.
Thunderbird also has an extension that uses folders to store this information but I disagree with this practice. Folders should be used only for messages, and I would use one single large folder in the first place, each message would be labeled and indexed.
Since when people started using email, calendar, address book and collaboration tools at the same time in the same application (this is why Zimbra, Lotus Notes and MS Outlook are so popular in companies). Needs are evolving and IMAP needs to extend its functionalities to meet these needs, especially for companies.