Outlook With FreeBSD IMAP

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, Feb 26, 2007, Brian wrote:
>Garrett Cooper wrote:
...
>>I honestly do think that MS Outlook complies as well as other IMAP 
>>clients, just like MS and their IE browser >_>...
>>
>>For example, the University of Washington has the following for their 
>>email client page: 
>>http://www.washington.edu/computing/email/programs.html#configuring , 
>>and if you note the location of outlook (the bottom) along with the 
>>information "we don't support this", then maybe you get a hunch about 
>>how usable Outlook is with IMAP.
>>
>>The UW uses uw-imap (whatever the latest version is) because they 
>>develop that mailserver.

As you say the U.W. would have a hard time using anything but uw-imap
(where do you thing the uw in uw-imap comes from :-).

We've been using courier-imap for about seven years now with thousands of
users at our ISP customer's sites.  One of our first installations was at a
local newspaper group, and I had problems at first until I discovered the
build option ``--enable-workarounds-for-imap-client-bugs'' which cured the
problems with broken Microsoft software (but I repeat myself).

Courier-imap uses qmail-style Maildir mail stores which I much prefer to
the monolithic files used by uw-imap as they make life generally easier:

   + The store each message in its own file where the file name consists of
     a time stamp, sequence, hostname, and status.

   + This method of storage eliminates all file locking problems so works
     well with clusters of servers writing and reading e-mail.

   + There aren't any issues when deleting messages as one has with the
     single-file stores where the entire file must be rewritten.

   + Unlike Cyrus-IMAP, which also uses per-file message stores, the
     Maildir format doesn't have a semi-proprietary database so works well
     with other Unix tools (e.g. you want to delete all files over thirty
     days old from a mail store, a command like this works a treat):

     find ~user/Maildir -mtime +30 | xargs rm

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
FAX:            (206) 232-9186  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676

A fake fortuneteller can be tolerated.  But an authentic soothsayer should
be shot on sight.  Cassandra did not get half the kicking around she deserved.
		-- R.A. Heinlein