I run a free webmail service and while trying to debug an access violation it gives after running a hour it hit me; I have Imail running behind an Apache reverse proxy to fix the problem that webmail takes the port on all IP's and to add the missing functionality of caching & compression, the other end has to be complemented with Declude Junkmail and Virus to make up for the missing parts there (Yes, they have an anti-virus scanner now, but for a joke price) and then there is the mail gateway placed before Imail to prevent DoS-es on the SMTP server. I have written several utilities myself to add missing administrative functions. Oh, don't forget the templates from HKSI!
I was thinking 'How the hell did it come this far???'. In the time I spent keeping Imail up & running and adding the missing parts I could've written a POP3/IMAP4 webmail implementation in PHP like 4 times! That's exactly what I started doing now. And while writing such an interface I came to Ipswitch's broken IMAP4 implementation, arg. Ipswitch used the time between version 6 & 7 to implement a crappy spellchecker and calender plus a way too expensive virusscanner instead of where they should've used it for: Fixing the bugs and adding requested features in their existing product. Now they've built all sorts of stuff on a broken base. I mean, who here can name one, just one, program that doesn't provide the option to bind to a specific IP? Are my users happy that they have a calendar, but that they can't read their mail for 10 minutes every hour? No they are not. I got over 200 e-mails of users complaining about the webmail and saying that as the most problems appeared after I installed the calendar (v6->v7) I could better remove it because they don't care about a calendar. I think that if Ipswitch thought for a second and zapped the calendar & spellchecker and then rewrote the core of the whole shite it would be a good product, but they are now too late for me. I will write an implementation on my own and search for a suitable SMTP/IMAP/POP3 solution and let Ipswitch rot. Ipswitch is just living on the name they aquired when their product was still working! But you got to work on your product over time to keep it up to date, not just add some utils on different ports, otherwise it will become the prehistoric core-based shite it is now. rant=off -- Regards, Terrence Koeman Technical Director/Administrator MediaMonks B.V. (www.mediamonks.nl) Please quote all replies in correspondence. ______________________________________________________________________ The HKSI-IMail Admin List is hosted by........ Humankind Systems, Inc. Questions, Comments or Complain like Hell.. mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Message Archive... http://www.tallylist.com/archives/index.cfm/mlist.4 To Manage your Subscription......... http://humankindsystems.com/lists
