[imp] Suggestions for wu-imap altenatives

[Alain Fauconnet]

On Thu, Sep 23, 2004 at 04:11:34AM -0500, Dan H wrote:
> Mike,
> 
> Honestly (in my opinion) switching to courier-imap isn't that painful.  I 
> used
> to be a regular user of wu-imap.  There was some trial and error 
> involved but I
> am much happier since I made the change.  Also the maildir system is a 
> much more
> efficient system. For example...

(...rest edited out for brievety...)

I agree 100% with that.

The only painful part is the conversion of the existing mailboxes from
mbox to maildir format. There are numerous scripts to to this. I  like
mb2md.pl that can process a bunch of mailboxes in a single run.

Of course, on a box with tens of thousands  of  mailboxes,  some  big,
that can take a while. I remember when I had to switch  the  server  I
was refering to in my previous mail... took me the whole night!

But I digress.

Something to consider too (and more on topic): when you offer both IMP
and direct POP or IMAP access, there's a high risk of  corrupting  the
mailboxes due to concurrent access e.g. user  leaves  his/her  Outlook
open on his/her desktop and also opens an IMP session from some remote
location:  *boom*. Oh yeah, UW-IMAP is 'supposed' to manage locking of
the  mailbox.  But there are so many critical windows that it's really
easy to fall in one. Especially if you have UW-IMAP and  Qpopper.  And
gone  is the mailbox. We experience 1-2 cases like this per month at a
2000-user site.

Courier and other Maildir-format servers manage concurrent access with
very little problem (none that has bitten us yet anyway).

Oh... can someone explain me why support for  mcrypt  would  make  IMP
faster? (I don't question it does, I just don't understand why!)

Greets,
_Alain_