On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 6:36 AM, Shane Chrisp <sh...@2000cn.com.au> wrote:
> Not having a go at the excellent work that's been done, but I don't know > why anyone would want to run courier these days when Dovecot runs so much > faster and uses so much less in the way of system resources. I use courier imap for few reasons below. Honestly, I haven't studied dovecot so much as to come to pros and cons. 1. IMAP and POP3 services get configured under supervise and tcpserver. i.e. courier-imap is daemontools and ucspi-tcp friendly. Since I use qmail as the MTA, everthing is quite like running qmail. 2. The code is modular. The programs for login, authentication and actual implementation of IMAP/POP3 protocol are all handled by different programs (e.g. imaplogin, pop3login, authvchkpw, imapd, pop3d). This makes it trivial implementing of hooks into courier-imap. I have implemented hooks to force password change, implement instant bulletins, send welcome mails to new users, quota warning to users exceeding disk space, etc. 3. The modular code has also helped me implement a proxy for IMAP and POP3. For an ISP we had around 3Million+ users. Using the proxy it was possible to have these users split across 30 different servers located at different places. NFS was not possible and the proxy authenticated against a database containing user locations and executed the executable imapd or pop3d on the remote host. The user could log in to any machine and still see all his/her mails. 4. All configuration items in courier-imap are configurable through environment variables. e.g. IMAP_CHECK_ALL_FOLDERS, IMAP_EMPTYTRASH, MAXPERIP, MAILDIRPATH, etc. Hence using envdir invocation in the run file of supervise makes it possible to configure courier-imap through simple text files. I am sure same would be possible in dovecot but I do not know as I have grown up from the early days (2001) with courier-imap. One of these days I might dirty my hands with dovecot. Till then it is courier-imap for me :) Regards Manvenda (http://www.indimail.org) !DSPAM:496ffbdb32671972818673!
