On Sat, Feb 01, 2003 at 02:08:18PM +0100, Hans Wilmer wrote: > Currently I'm trying to figure out what software to use best to set up > an IMAP server for the company I'm working at. I'll be using Debian > Woody for the server, and the following requirements and suppositions > are given: [...]
... well, commenting myselfe :) Thank you very much for your nice feedback so far! It seems that the imap part of courier fits nicely into what I want. I've done some testing by installing it on my server here at home to access the ~/Maildir of a testuser, using squirrelmail, imp and the mozilla client. To have a few mails to run the tests on, I copied over my debian-users maildir folder that currently holds 37638 mails. Also, I've been using rsync, as suggested for making backups, to keep the copy of the folder in sync, and it works very well :) But there are some issues/questions that came up: 1.) performance: My server has an IDE disk only, and it turned out that imapd tends to heavily access the disk. Performance (700 MHz Athlon) is ok for one user, accessing a folder holding a handful of mails only. But when accessing the debian-users folder, it takes quite a while until mails are displayed, and access is unusably slow when sorting the mails by date. When trying to get a threaded view with squirrelmail, the PHP script even times out. Performance depends on the client used. The mozilla client works fine even when creating heavy load on the server by accessing the same debian-users folder with several clients. The webmail clients time out. When there's load on the server, even apache can get to eat up almost 100% CPU. This results in not responding to other requests, what seems not exactly acceptable. It can't be that one user blocks the server so that others can't do anything but wait. Users would loudly complain. How can I get the best performance and prevent the server from being blocked by single users (letting aside using good disks and maybe RAID)? Using large amounts of RAM doesn't seem to help. 2.) local users: As mentioned in my other mail, users will not have a shell login to the server. They'll access it solely with the IMAP clients. What security issues are against creating local users under these circumstances? 3.) filesystem: One of you suggested to use xfs. It has the advantage of, at least theoretically, making better use of the disk space and wouldn't have inode limitations. It claims to be faster in maintaining huge amounts of relatively small files, as would be the case with using maildir. But once I tried it xfs on my workstation, and I managed to destroy some data by remounting partitions from read only to rw and vice versa. I was lucky as the partitions that were damaged only contained some games I could reinstall from the CDs, but the experience lead me to remove xfs and get back to ext2 (and now ext3). That I destroyed data on the xfs partitions was very probably due to my own fault by not specifying the correct parameters when doing the remounts. I couldn't verify that because I removed xfs before I noticed that it might have been my fault. However, my conclusion was not to use xfs unless it's really neccessary for the ACLs it provides. May it be stable or not, ext3 seems much easier in handling than xfs, thus making it less prone to mistaken handling. Is using xfs instead of ext3 actually such a big advantage (in speed) that this justifies the more complicated handling? Where do I find more information about the mount options of ext3, as mentioned in http://www.stahl.bau.tu-bs.de/~hildeb/postfix/ext3.shtml? 4.) quotas: What will happen when a user reaches the quota limit so that exim cannot deliver any more mail to his ~/Maildir? In your experience, how much disk space will users actually need to store their mails? 5.) hardware: Any special hardware recommendations? Maybe a dual processor maschine? Hm, won't make much sense with IDE disks ... GH -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]