[gentoo-server] email confusion

[Ben Munat]

I use qmail, vpopmail, horde-imp, courier-imap, qmail-scanner, spamassassin, clamav, 
qmailadmin and vqadmin on my server. Yesterday, I updated courier-imap from 3.0.8 to 4.0.1 
and managed to render all my mail users unable to check their email. As a caveat to anyone 
who is using courier-imap and hasn't gotten around to the update, the courier folks have 
"unbundled" authdaemon into a separate package called courier-authlib. The ebuild seems to 
take care of all this correctly... I'm not sure what I screwed up.

Anyway, I entered a bug (http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=80879) and have been 
discussing what I may have done wrong and how to avoid any problems. (There are some 
specific instructions from Robin Johnson on how to safely do the upgrade.) However, it has 
been bothering me throughout this that I don't really know why I have courier-imap. I've 
never instructed any mail users to set up their clients to use imap and when I just tried 
to set up thunderbird to check one of my mail accounts via imap it fails. I don't know 
what package ever wanted it, but none of my current mail programs seems to need it.

So, not wishing to start any imap vs. pop3 holy wars (though I will confess that I was 
very opposed to imap when I set up the server cuz my school's imap server was painfully 
slow... have heard that that's because they were using mbox instead of maildir...), but I 
was wondering if anyone uses qmail for smtp-ssl and pop3-ssl? Hmm, that's a good point... 
looking through the qmail docs, I don't see anything about ssl... maybe *that's* why I 
have courier-imap... for the ssl...

thoughts anyone??
b