Getting a new server

[Kövesdán Gábor]

Hi,

Lisa Casey wrote:

> Hi Gabor,
>
>>
>> I'd suggest using courier-imap or something else instead of qpopper. 
>> Afaik, qpopper supports only the mailbox format, which is slower and 
>> less secure than the maildir format used by modern pop3/imap servers. 
>> Courier-imap has a pop3 and an imap part, both of them have SSL 
>> support and are easily configurable. Your company migth benefit from 
>> running an imap server too. It has a bunch of advantages over pop3, 
>> so this might make your users feel more appreciated.
>
>
> I agree you have a pointg here, my main concerns are:
>
> 1) I'm used to Sendmail/Qpopper. I'm used to installing these, 
> maintaining these and troubleshooting these. I also want changing over 
> the mail server to be as seamless as possible for our customers. So I 
> don't really want to add a Courier-imap learning curve (for both 
> myself and my customers) right on top of things.
>
I see that, but it isn't so hard if you can use MySQL or OpenLDAP, and I 
assume you can use MySQL at least. PostgreSQL is okay, of course. The 
basic configuration is pretty straightforward. You have to set the basic 
options about the behaviour of the imap server, then you have to create 
an SQL table or an LDAP directory where you store all the mail account 
information. Then you specify to the courier-server which SQL server, 
which table, ... to use. That's it. There are a bunch of good howto 
documents on the net, and if you use MySQL I can send you a sample 
configuration, too. As for your customers, they don"t have to learn 
anything new about that. Courier-imap has a pop3 part, too, as I said, 
so they can still use their mailer program set up. Using courier-imap 
means you just more functionality, not less and not different.
As for sendmail, it can handle maildirs, I don't know how to configure, 
because I use Postfix, but it can't be so hard.
Here are some howtos if you want to take a look. They use Postfix as an 
MTA, but the courier-imap part is useful for you:

http://postfixwiki.org/index.php?title=Virtual_Users_and_Domains_with_Courier-IMAP_and_MySQL
http://www.phparchitecture.com/howto_show.php?id=2
http://workaround.org/articles/ispmail-sarge/
http://www.marlow.dk/site.php/tech/postfix
   

> 2) I also am used to (and kind of like) having all of the mailboxes in 
> one location on the system (/var/mail/). How much of a performance hit 
> is there in mbox mailboxes vs mdir format mailboxes?

I managed to find a benchmark about this:
http://www.courier-mta.org/mbox-vs-maildir/

Anyway, here's a benchmark about MTAs if you're interested. Postfix does 
much faster than sendmail. And much easier configurable, so it is also 
easy to learn.
http://www-dt.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de/~ma/postfix/bench2.html

Regards,

Gabor Kovesdan