documentation

[Tom Allison]

After about three weeks I have managed to get some of cyrus-imap working 
but only with an authentication model based on pam->/etc/passwd.
I tried to get sasldb working as a configuration model and was 
completely unable to get sasldb authentication for sieveshell.
So I tried to remove the sasldb config and revert to the pam setup until 
I could get it sorted out.

That was inconsistent at best.

Trying to set up LDAP is even worse.  It's trying to authenticate my 
'ldapadd' against the /etc/sasldb2 data files.
How that happened is well beyond my imaginations.

At this point I have concluded that:
sieveshell doesn't work very well
sieveshell has absolutely no documentation available.
In general, when it comes the the authentication models for cyrus-imap 
you're on your own if you can't wade your way through whitepapers.  Not 
a solution based on practical application.

I'm sorely dissappointed with the level of documentation for cyrus-imap.
I can't even find enough documentation and/or consistency in the code to 
consider getting my own documentation together in efforts to resolve 
this deficiency.

I will see about rebulding this stupid box from scratch and seeing what 
I can get working a second time around without dabbling with 
/etc/sasldb, that tended to really screw up my system.  Maybe I can at 
least get things working to a authentication model based on /etc/passwd 
for now and try for something better in the future.

But as a note to the people who manage this code: From what I have seen 
this is an excellent product when it works, but like many they lack 
suitable documentation.
For example: the documentation on sieveshell consists of a blank page.  WTF?

I've probably labeled myself on this list as a real A-Hole at this point 
and I'm kind of sorry about that.  But I have never had to spend so much 
time on anything before to only end up with something that kind of works 
some of the time.
But I have been trying very carefully to read the available 
documentation, take notes on my configuration, make back-ups of my 
configuration files and to carefully validate each step of the process.
Even with all of that effort, it's just inconsistent.
I suspect that most of the problems I am seeing are more related to 
sieveshell than cyrus-imap itself.  But if this is the only mechanism 
available for filtering email under cyrus-imap then it's a requirement 
that it works correctly and consistently.