[imp] IMP/Horde usability

[Kevin G. Hammond]

Much thanks goes out to Parag Godkar for his excellent post on howto
install horde/imp via RPM's on RedHat 8. Twice in the past I tried to
get imp working via tarballs to no avail. Previously I devoted a good
twenty to thirty hours trying to get the combination of horde, php,
apache, mysql to all like each other. Following Parag's post, it took me
less than an hour to get imp up and running without one glitch!!!! One
note to his post though, you still need to follow the configuration
sections of the horde and imp installs. Here is a Google link to his

post:

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=redhat+8+group:mailing.www.horde-imp&s
<http://groups.google.com/groups?q=redhat+8+group:mailing.www.horde-imp&
s> 

tart=10&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=apt34k%242vt1%241%40FreeBSD.csie.NCTU.ed

u.tw&rnum=15

To the developers, for whatever reason, the installation instructions
are very complicated. I am definitely not a UNIX guru, but I am a Linux
admin. I have performed many functions from ./configure, make, make
install to disaster recovery of a live server including migrating passwd
files, mail stores, websites with data collecting cgi scripts. I prefer
RedHat out of the box solutions and RPM's to tarballs. My experience is
that most tarballs won't work out of the box, and usually 15 minutes of
google searches is required to figure out what was missing from the
documentation. This is very true for horde/imp. Take note of the above
post and consider a quick up and running howto.

Now, onto my questions. On some of our Linux boxes, our usernames do not
match our email address. For instance, an account user_ha will have an
email address of user at company.com. We have imp doing authentication
right now, so when the user logs in as user_ha, horde displays his email
address as user_ha at company.com. Email works properly, but the display
looks slightly confusing to some users. I have mysql running as a
preference provider, but I did not uncomment this part in horde.php. I
assumed we wouldn't need to store preferences since we wouldn't have
local accounts because of imp authentication. Is this a
mis-understanding? If so, how do the preference's associate themselves
to an email account?

Our next thought is to run two instances of horde on the server, one
with imp authentication, and one with horde authentication. Can this be
done by simply putting them in two different directories and performing
the appropriate httpd.conf adjustments? If we do this, can a horde
account store imp email account(s) in its preference settings? If so,
will these email settings be read while using the imp module?

Also, when we tested horde against some Microsoft Exchange servers via
IMAP, they defaulted to the middle of the inbox. When you resort by date
or author, you go back to the middle of the inbox. Is this a known issue
and is their a known work around? The performance to the Exchange
servers is a lot slower than to our Linux servers running IMAP. There
are no consistent variables between the Exchange servers such as network
speed, processor speed, RAM. It seems odd that one would be
significantly slower than the other since it is all IMAP.

The address book also comes up with php errors. I assume this is either
because we are using imp authentication, or because I did not configure
the mysql preference settings yet.

I know I threw a lot into this email. Please provide any assistance to
the above questions,

Thank You,

Kevin Hammond