sendmail / IMAP

[Robert Meyer]

Well, here is a subject that is near and dear to my heart. :-)

If you're going to use a distribution, I would HIGHLY recommend that you use
the packages that are included with the dist.  The reason for this is that if
you are using the RPMS, you can get the updates from RedHat when there are
security changes, etc. that need to be addressed.  If you're always building
from source, you have to go looking for them on your own...

Setting up sendmail is not too difficult but you need to decide which IMAP
package you're going to use.  I've use UW-IMAP and Courier.  Courier uses the
'maildir' format for storing messages and UW-IMAP uses the older style 'mbox'
format.  It depends on what your requirements are.  If you need to have Email
folders that have both folders and messages in them, then you need to use the
'maildir' format.

If you're going to use 'maildir' format, then I have a small 'procmail' script
that stores the messages in that format.  Sendmail stores things in 'mbox'
format by default.

If your users are Outlook fanatics, you're kinda stuck using 'courier' 'cuz
Outlook does bad things.  You will have to hack the courier config to allow
more connections than 4 from a single host since Outlook likes to start as many
as 12 simultaneous connections (really stupid 'cuz Windows doesn't do a good
job of keeping track of its threads).

I'm sure that Mark is going to pipe up about using 'qmail'.  It works but its
very complicated.  Its supposed to be faster but I have never had a problem
with sendmail at all.  Sendmail's 'milter' interface also works very well with
many of the antivirus programs that scan for Windows viruses in Email messages.

I know someone that is really good at setting this stuff up :-)

Send me your number and we can chat about it if you'd like.

Cheers!

Bob
--- cliff at cliffmeyers.com wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> 
> I was wondering if anyone out there had any experience setting up sendmail,
> also
> with IMAP support.  I use RedHat 8 on all my servers and I'm tempted to use
> their
> RPMs (sendmail, sendmail-cf, imap) to set this up, but typically I try to
> compile
> everything from source so I'm a bit hesitant to rely on their packages.
> 
> If anyone could direct me to a decent HOWTO for configuring sendmail to act
> as a
> single domain e-mail server (or possibly multi domain) and then tell me a
> little
> more about getting an IMAP daemon working with it, that'd be fantastic. 
> Sendmail's configuration files are cryptic at best, and there's no way I'll
> replace our current e-mail server (EIMS on a Mac, yuck) until I'm sure it's
> configured properly and reasonably secure.
> 
> If anyone has any suggestions besides sendmail, I'd be willing to check that
> out
> too.  Thanks very much, everyone.
> 
> 
> -Cliff


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