[CentOS] IMAP servers and Sent/Junk folders

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, Aug 31, 2009, Alexander Dalloz wrote:
>> On Mon, Aug 31, 2009, Eugene Vilensky wrote:
>>>Hi,
>>>
>>>my users were recently moved from a uw-imap on HPUX to dovecot on EL5.
>>> Their sent items and folders went from a ~/Sent mbox file (when using
>>>SquirrelMail and Apple Mail both) to ~/mail/Sent for SquirrelMail and
>>>~/mail/Sent Messages for other imap clients.  I notice I can cat the
>>>files together and the only artifact is I end up with multiple "This
>>>message is part of the system do not delete" visible to the user's
>>>mail client.  Is there any advice anyone can give me regarding this or
>>>other solution?
>>
>> When I wrote a script to extract messages from UW-Imap mbox files
>> (or standard BSD mail folders where UW-imap was used), moving
>> them to Maildir storage, it was easy to just look at the Subject
>> line of each message, ignoring those with the don't remove this.
>
>double plus from my side to use Maildir with dovecot instead of mbox file
>storage.
>
>There are several scripts and solution for migration. It is easy and once
>dovecot can use its indexed Maildir, you will see a huge improvement in
>speed accessing the mailboxes. Especially if mailboxes are not just pretty
>small.

One of the main reasons we have been using courier-imap for the better part
of a decade is that we have several ISP clients where there are 10s of
thousands of customers pretty constantly checking their e-mail with POP or
IMAP.  The courier authentication works much like apache with pre-spawned
daemon processes that have proven very effective.

Personally our system does server-side e-mail routing into
different IMAP folders based on various headers, and I have 11
folders that I monitor, many of these with several thousand
messages (yes I save messages for quick retrieval).

The access speed seems to depend more on the IMAP client than on
the server.  The current version of squirrelmail surprised me
with its speed while horde/imp is pretty sluggish.  Apple's
Mail.app is quite a bit slower than Thunderbird on the same
folders.

>> FWIW, we use courier-imap, not dovecot, and I know nothing about
>> dovcot beyond that it's imap and how to spell it.
>
>http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailLocation/Maildir
>http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/Maildir

I'll take a look at these, but will probably stay with what's
working for us -- if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Bill
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