[WBEL-users] Replacement for imapd?

[Kirby C. Bohling]

On Tue, Apr 05, 2005 at 08:21:18PM -0700, Benjamin Smith wrote:
> I'm using sendmail/Imapd as configured by default so that email resides on the 
> server and is backed up. 
> 
> However, we're heavy email users, and parsing a 100 MB mail spool file is 
> starting to whale the tar out of our itty bitty mail server. 
> 
> What recommendations do you have to replace the default imapd for imap 
> support? Something with better performance, decent compatability, and that 
> doesn't stop me from backing up email easily to tape or disk2disk.... 
> 

Change mail box formats...  Don't ask me how to do it, I don't know.
I use mbox format for my INBOX, but for all others I use mbx (which
is an indexed version of mbox, at the top of each message).  If you
just create the folders in a different format, the stock imapd will
figure out which file format they are.  There's a way you can change
the default for folders created over the imap connection.  Otherwise
you just have to use the correct syntax with "mbxcreat".

To change the INBOX format, I believe you have to fiddle with your
sendmail config and change the local delivery agent.

I don't know how we changed the defaults I didn't set up our mail
server.  If you use procmail, you end up having to use tmail to
deliver your mail.  By default procmail assumes all folders are in
mbox format.  You'll corrupt your mail folders if you don't make
that change.

Depending on the filesystem you use, and how many messages get
stored in a single folder, "mh", isn't the worlds worst way.
However, as we used the default ext3, if you have more then 1000
messages in a single folder the performance degrades badly (too many
files in a single directory).  Until directory indexing is in the RH
kernel, mh is a bad idea.  If you use reiserfs, it's my
understanding it doesn't suffer from this problem.

	Kirby