Collaboration replacement via Toltec/Bynari (was How many people to admin a Cyrus system?)

[Ian Eiloart]

--On 15 November 2007 15:55:32 +0100 Olaf Fraczyk <olaf at navi.pl> wrote:

> On Thu, 2007-11-15 at 15:50 +0200, Joon Radley wrote:
>> Hi Ian,
>>
>> > What I don't understand is that you seem to think that there's a
>> > possibility that email could be stored in some place that it can't be
>> > transported to. Where would that be?
>>
>> Please read the mails before this one.

I did.

>> This discussion is about what
>> Outlook needs in order to process special messages. When new mail is
>> received and before the messages gets injected into the message store it
>> need to be processed. That is why you get a clear distinction between
>> transport and storage. Where in IMAP the message is injected directly
>> into the storage.

Now that's certainly not true.

IMAP is a protocol for reading messages from mail stores. It has nothing to 
do with delivery of messages to the mail store.

You're confusing IMAP with mail stores, which may or may not actively 
participate in delivery.

For example, we used to use University of Washington IMAP server with the 
Exim MTA. Exim handled message delivery - simply putting emails into 
mailboxes. UoW IMAP simply served to provide access to those mailboxes, 
including listing, searching, transferring between mailboxes and reading 
message headers and bodies. OK, so the mail server did do one thing that 
impacted on delivery - file locking to prevent delivery processes from 
conflicting with IMAP mailbox activity.

Cyrus Mailstore does handle final delivery, but there's plenty of 
opportunity to handle messages before that point. For example, we now use 
Exim and Cyrus Mailstore, and we have plenty of processing going on in Exim 
before hand off to Cyrus (with LMTP) including spamassassin, clamav and 
Exim filters. There are also processes between the two, for example Mailman.

-- 
Ian Eiloart
IT Services, University of Sussex
x3148