Out of Topic: IMAP

[Scott Silva]

Richard Frovarp spake the following on 2/8/2007 8:19 AM:
> Bob Jones wrote:
>> Thus spake Richard Frovarp, with impeccable timing on 2/8/2007 10:26 AM:
>>>
>>> We run IMAP and use mbx format. There are occasional issues when the
>>> index is corrupted, but there are tools to fix it. Using mbx over
>>> maildir prevents the system from having to read n files for the
>>> required information, where n is the number of messages in the
>>> folder. As you might expect n can grow to be quite large.
>>
>> While this may be true in UW-IMAP (not sure, never tried maildir with
>> it), if you use something like dovecot that has an index cache of each
>> mailbox, the system only has to read all those individual files once
>> to create the cache.  In fact, if you use the LDA that comes with
>> dovecot, when the message is delivered it is added to the index
>> automatically, so the filesystem never has to worry about reading all
>> those individual files, just each one as the client accesses to
>> actually read the mail.
>>
>> Also, even if you are using mbox format, I highly recommend dovecot as
>> it blows the doors off of UW even with that format.
>>
>> Bob
>>
> 
> Quota handling seems to be a little odd in it. It says it doesn't play
> well with file system quotas. The Maildir++ quota seems to be a bit more
> difficult to work with than file system quotas. On first look, I don't
> see any easy way to tell if a user is over quota or support for grace
> periods.
That is one negative. If a user goes over quota, they will get locked out with
a cryptic and very terse message. The first time it happened to me, it took me
hours to figure out what happened. Especially when the message from the quota
daemon tries to go to an already over-quota user.
Another thing I miss about UW-imap is its logging of box accesses and
activity. You got a nice message on when a user got their mail, and even if
they left it or cleared it. I can't find any equivalent in dovecot. It is
handy when a user says they didn't get something, and you can see that they
did, but either deleted it or have a bad rule in their MUA.

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