Christopher Chan wrote:
One large factor for me deciding to migrate to dovecot's lda
('deliver') is to use SIEVE, which is under active development and is
likely to become a standard (imho). I see no point in creating another
lda.
Yeah, with SIEVE support being found in Kmail and addons or plugins for
thunderbird and probably others...it kinda paves the way for a standard eh?
I neglected to mention that there are already more than a handful of
RFCs related to Sieve. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_(mail_filtering_language)
What I do see is a need for vpopmail to be able to give 'deliver' any
data it needs to do its job (for instance maildir or mailbox,
destination location, etc). At some point vpopmail might also include
providing SIEVE filtering rules.
The only problem I see at this point in time is how dependent vpopmail
is on others to make use of it.
I don't see this necessarily as a problem. Applications will choose to
provide hooks for vpopmail as they see fit. The factors which make
vpopmail a good choice (existing infrastructure, modularity, stability,
etc.) will drive other applications to use it (or not).
vpopmail started out as something to
fill out a need missing in the qmail toolchains. Even then, qmail did
not have everything (eg: no imap) and it is really nice that dovecot
added vpopmail support especially since Sam dropped vpopmail support
from courier toolchains.
I was happy to see vpopmail support in dovecot as well. While the
elimination of vpopmail support in courier was a large factor in
deciding to replace it with dovecot as the stock IMAP service in
qmail-toaster (http://www.qmailtoater.com), we've seen nice performance
improvements with dovecot over courier as well. Add in the Sieve factor,
and the decision to use dovecot is any easy one.
If vpopmail can take things a bit beyond just say single system user and
perhaps be able to handle 1) multi system user virtual domains and 2)
massive multi system user management with an appropriate backend like
pgsql, then I hope there is incentive for the dovecot guys to keep their
relationship with vpopmail and not try to come up with their own
management module.
I think that ldap provides the scalable backend you're looking for.
I'd be surprised if the dovecot developers attempt to develop their own
management module. It's outside of their scope.
Right now, postfix + dovecot + vpopmail looks pretty neat without
getting too many different libraries/frameworks involved. If this can be
taken a step further...
I agree. The question is, which step further? I hope a little discussion
here will help to clarify that question. Given vpopmail's roots as you
mentioned, I'd like to see vpopmail's focus sharpened, strengthening
it's role in the email server landscape.
Thanks to everyone for their participation in this, past and future.
--
-Eric 'shubes'
!DSPAM:4a9d2dc232711270229179!
