HowTo-ish question

[Kevin P. Fleming]

Rich West wrote:

> We did manage to get the cyrus-imap server up and running in a Fedora 
> Core 2 environment authenticating against PAM (which in turn talks to 
> our LDAP servers), but we could not get users in to the system.  
> Essentially, with our test environment, the mail client (in this case, 
> Mozilla Thunderbird) kept erroring out stating that the mailbox did not 
> exist (the inbox) when, in fact, users.<username> did exist in the 
> user's home directory.

You are missing some very basic knowledge here: Cyrus IMAP is a closed 
system. It manages the message store on its own, entirely outside the 
user's home directories, and the message store is never touched by any 
non-Cyrus process. Messages come in via SMTP, LMTP or IMAP (or NNTP, in 
recent versions), and they go out via POP3, IMAP (or NNTP). The 
remainder of the workings are a "black box".

> So, any solution that we would come up with would have to satisfy the 
> same requirements: sendmail MTA, global mail tagging, server side local 
> user delivery filtering, and finally POP/IMAP access with user 
> authentication passed off through PAM to our LDAP servers.  Of course, 
> we would need a way to convert from UW's mbox style to maildir format.

All of this is possible; many people use sendmail to feed mail to Cyrus 
IMAP (and default configs for doing so are included with Cyrus IMAP), 
"mail tagging" can continue to be done by your MTA or some other process 
that sits in between the MTA and Cyrus IMAP, server side filtering is 
done via Sieve filters (which do not have all the flexibility of 
procmail, but are pretty useful nonetheless). I don't know why you think 
"maildir format" is relevant (see above); there is no direct filesystem 
conversion into Cyrus IMAP message store, it is always done via IMAP. 
Most people use a tool that's distributed with uw-imap to do this; you 
basically log in to your existing IMAP system and extract the messages, 
feeding them into Cyrus IMAP via IMAP as well.

> Can Cyrus work with procmail?  It would be a lot more pain on our part 
> to re-invent that portion of the entire process (the scripts, the 
> customized web interface, etc).

Not in the way you have been using it, no. You can certainly have global 
procmail filters that happen before sendmail sends the mail to Cyrus 
IMAP, but not per-user procmail filtering. Most people that implement 
Cyrus IMAP use some other form of web-based Sieve filter management 
(there are a few out there: websieve, Horde Ingo, avelsieve add-on for 
Squirrelmail, etc).
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