PHP frustrations with IMP install

[Robin Whittle]

Last year I installed horde-1.2.0-pre13 and IMP imp-2.2.0-pre13 - and 
it was not at all straightforward.   I documented it at length, and this
has been a very popular page on my web site:

  
http://www.firstpr.com.au/web-mail/IMP-How-I-did-it/0imp-etc_install.html

I have been told that it has helped a number of people install IMP and
that one large installation for some high schools in Germany wouldn't
have happened without my page.

I find that IMP is a bugger of a thing to install.  It requires a series
of other things, which are not so clearly defined, are highly
interdependent and which are sometimes horde-specific versions of
earlier versions of things which are already installed in the server. 
The IMP documentation goes from one file to another and is really hard
to follow.  These problems are likely to be invisible to experienced IMP
users and the developers because you already know your way around all
this stuff.  For this reason, I wrote up my installation experience in
the hope that the difficulties I had would help improve the IMP
installation documentation.


Recently I tried to install horde-1.2.5 and imp-2.2.5 on a fresh RedHat
7.1 system.  Again, I found the documentation convoluted and hard to
follow.  I got seriously stuck installing the various PHP preliminaries
- they stopped Apache running.  Please remember that I and many other
users have no idea at all what these various pre-requisites for IMP do,
or what they might interact with, or how they might upset in our
systems.  So when we do figure out which ones to install, and we later
find that they stop Apache from starting (despite this not being
mentioned as a possibility), what do we do?    I tried and tried and
then gave up.  I installed Postman instead.   I am not suggesting that
Postman does what IMP does and I am sure that it has all sorts of
security problems which IMP is carefully crafted to avoid - but for my
limited needs, Postman does the trick.  The attraction for me is that
Postman is written in straightforward C++ (so it is easy to understand
and modify, and runs very fast) and doesn't depend on anything else.

Nonetheless, for the benefit of the IMP project, I have put the the
documentation of my abortive installation attempt on my web site.  It
contains specific recommendations (in easy-to-spot pink boxes) about how
I think the IMP documentation can be improved.  The IMP material is
final section of:

  http://www.firstpr.com.au/web-mail/RH71-Postfix-Courier-Maildrop-IMAP/

I hope this helps improve IMP!


Please refer to  http://www.firstpr.com.au/web-mail/ for:

  Postman    How I installed the C++ based Postman web-mail program 
             (from University of Valencia, Spain) on Red Hat 7.1 with 
             Courier IMAP, in August 2001.  Includes bugfixes and 
             improvements.  This is the system I am using now.  Also 
             something of a comparison between:  
           
                 Postman 
                 IMP      (but from mid 2000, not the latest 2001 
                           development with searching etc.) 
                 SqWebMail


  SqWebMail My notes on installing the C based Courier SqWebMail program 
            on Red Hat 7.1 with Courier IMAP. 


  RH71-Postfix-Courier-Maildrop-IMAP  Big documentation of how I 
            installed on Red Hat 7.1: 
  
                Postfix 
                Courier Maildrop - for mail filtering 
                Courier IMAP 
                An incomplete attempt at installing IMP. 


  Maildrop-mods-filtering  Three things here: 

                DELTAG. Modification to Maildrop to allow for 
                        delivering a message with the "Tagged for 
                        Deletion" IMAP flag set. 

                subjadd An external program to add labels to the 
                        Subject: lines of messages, such as [XYZ].  
                        (Also adds a subject line if there was none.)

                Notes and examples of Maildrop's excellent mail 
                filtering capabilities. 


  mb2md     A perl script to convert a bunch of Mbox mailboxes to 
            Maildir format. 


  IMP-How-I-did-it/0imp-etc_install.html  How I installed the IMP
            web-mail program with Red Hat 6.1 and Postfix in July 2000.  


   - Robin