HowTo-ish question

Rich West Rich.West at wesmo.com
Fri Feb 11 12:04:08 EST 2005


We have begun investigating alternatives to the mbox-style UW-Imap 
implementation that we have had in place for years, and, of course, we 
came across cyrus-imap.

In digging in to things, I was surprised to see that the How-To 
documentation is way out of date, and, really, there is no current 
how-to or FAQ-style documentation.

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.

At that point, we couldn't seem to figure things out, and turned to the 
web.  Unfortunately, we didn't make much head way.  As it is, I stumbled 
across a reference (in the FAQ) to configuring cyrus-imap to run as a 
stand alone process rather than out of xinetd.. it wasn't outright 
stated that you cannot run it out of xinetd, but, by the fact that we 
couldn't get that to work, we assumed that it had to run stand-alone.

As I dug further, I realized I had more questions, and I thought I would 
ask them here.  I realize that some of this may have been asked before 
by others (as I did find some unanswered references in the archives), 
but I thought I would ask them all here in one thread. :)

Our current environment consists of sendmail and procmail, to which we 
utilize procmail for some global tagging via SpamAssassin and local 
filtering of email to various mailboxes (if the end user so desires).  
We provide UW-Imap/pop access for the clients to gain access to their 
email, and we provide file system level quotas.  Users, however, do not 
have access to the system directly.  All access is via POP3, IMAP, 
POP3S, IMAPS, and FTP.

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.

I *believe* Cyrus-imap can provide the POP/IMAP access, which is, 
obviously, the first step.  But, we couldn't get the MUA to read the 
freshly initialized inbox.

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).  Is there an updated How-To (official or 
unofficial)?  What is the best way to perform a mass migration without 
having passwords to every account, even if it has to be done 
sequentially, one account at a time, in an automated fashion?

Any info would be wonderful!

Thanks!
-Rich

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