On Wednesday, June 25, 2003, Jon Angliss wrote...

> PHP 4.3.x is supposed to handle multi-byte characters a little better
> than the earlier versions, so that'd be a good start. For a trial, you
> might want to try throwing 1.4.1[cvs], or 1.5.0[cvs], against the same
> user, as there have been some changes in header handling that have
> been known to affect mailbox listings. Also you might want to check to
> see if your IMAP server has support for server side sorting, and if
> so, enabling it in the SquirrelMail configuration (it's under the
> General options iirc in config/conf.pl).

We will definitely be using the server side sorting in Cyrus 2.1.12- I've
already run across a user with 600,000+ messages in their Inbox who was
complaining (some people just don't know how to manage their e-mail!) I'm
working on building up php 4.3.2 - the only reason I didn't start with this
version was I still see the warning about php 4.3.x in the docs.. are the SM
developers getting comfortable with the 4.3 series such that this warning might
be removed any time soon?

> How do you distinguish between mailboxes/post-offices?  Is there some
> kind of user format in the username that identifies it, for example:
>
>   [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>   [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> If so, it shouldn't be that difficult to work it out... I'm sure if
> not with a plugin, small tweaks could be made. Although I believe the
> vlogin plugin [1] can handle something like that quite nicely.

This is a two part answer..

We have somewhere around a dozen IMAP/POP servers worldwide and they are
completely independent of each other - an actual e-mail address internally
looks like <unix-acct>@<site-po>.ti.com - and no, we do not have unique
usernames across all of these servers, so bobsmith@<dallas-imap> can be owned
by one user and bobsmith@<japan-imap> could be owned by someone completely
different. In the initial roll out, we will have SM installed on each site
server, so the base SM distribution works well since we point to localhost:143,
and each user knows which post office they are on (i.e., they know to access
http://<dallas-imap>/squirrelmail/) so this is pretty easy.

The second part is the tricky part - we will have one machine that needs to
access all of the post offices - and we plan on putting a wrapper around the SM
login page so it redirects them to https://<dmz-webmail>/<dallas-imap>/ and SM
doesn't have to worry about what server to connect to since each instance is in
its own directory with its own config file (btw, I LOVE the
config_local.php!!). Since each instance of SM can be configured to connect to
a different database, we will basically have multiple databases, one per site
server - so the post office installed instance of SM
(http://<dallas-server>/squirrelmail/) will connect to the same database as the
DMZ webmail host (https://<dmz-webmail>/<dallas-imap>/) and the user will get
the same preferences to make things simpler for the end user.

The wrapper will basically translate the <user>@ti.com account out of LDAP into
their physical e-mail address <user>@<site-imap-server>, and thankfully, the
@ti.com records _are_ unique. This works half of the time, because while we
only allow a person to have one @ti.com address, they could potentially have
hundreds of accounts internally, so if the user were to enter their physical
e-mail address, such as bobsmith@<japan-imap>.ti.com, it needs to go directly
to that instance of SquirrelMail instead of trying to expand the LDAP record.

Not only will we have the DMZ webmail instances of SquirrelMail connecting to
Cyrus/IMAP servers, I'm also having to deal with Exchange 5.5 and soon Exchange
2000 - unless we can reverse proxy them directly to outlook web access since
they want all of the bells and whistles exchange offers them anyway.
Thankfully, the Exchange userids are unique (domain\userid), but having SM
convert the backslash (or in some cases, I've seen a forward slash '/' log them
in successfully) to a safe character is something else I'm concerned about..
but I think I saw a message where this was fixed in CVS?

If the multilogin plugin stored preferences (and address books and personal
dictionaries) into a format such as data/imap-server/imap-username - we might
be able to use it, instead of creating multiple instances of SM.. but since
we'd want to change configuration options based on which IMAP server the user
logs into, I'm not sure if this would be the best solution.

I haven't really looked into the vlogin plugin much because it appeared to be
for ISPs that want to have multiple domains/names for the same IMAP server..
but I'll pull it down and see if it might be an option.

> The way the code is set to run, the database should only be accessed
> when preferences are changed, first accessed, or on logout (if the
> user hits the logout button that is). The rest is stored into session
> data, and should be accessed instead.

Great! I'm happy to hear this won't be beating on the preferences, and since
we're planning on storing PHP sessions in a memory based (tmpfs) file system,
such as /tmp, storing preferences in a database will less painful for the users
who will have to deal with the initial latency of logging in from a remote
site.

I will test a few of our torture test mailboxes containing some crazy (broken
mime, encoded mime, and mangled headers) messages against the CVS version and
let you know how things go.. we do have quite a few users with 3,000+ messages
in their Inbox, but we won't be supporting users with more than 100,000
messages in a single folder, even if SquirrelMail can paginate them all before
PHP times out.

Anyway, I know the details are messy, but Thanks again!

-- 
Chris Winterrowd
Unix E-mail Administrator
Texas Instruments Inc.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
214.567.5141


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