*BSD News Article 85526


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From: dsf@node6.frontiernet.net (Dan Foster)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: IMAP servers
Date: 23 Dec 1996 17:20:35 -0500
Organization: Frontier Internet, A reliable part of your life
Lines: 27
Message-ID: <59n0jj$l6u@node6.frontiernet.net>
References: <32BEE949.52DF@sequel.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: node6.frontiernet.net
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:33025

In article <32BEE949.52DF@sequel.com>,
Robert J. Rubin <rubin@sequel.com> wrote:
>Has anyone played with IMAP servers on FreeBSD?  Ported one?

Cyrus IMAP server sounds like a rather decent IMAP server package.
That is, it's more full-featured in authentication than the UW server
package - which was one of my site's big needs (ie lots of machines,
users, various auth schemes.. needed to fit in the big picture easily).

It didn't build out of the box for FreeBSD so I made some modifications
which then allowed me to run it under FreeBSD. I'm not sure if somebody's
already submitted FreeBSD patches for cyrus, but if not, I can do that.

One nit, though - FreeBSD will give you the encrypted password field only
if your euid is 0, yet cyrus imapd doesn't like it if you're running as
euid 0 (root). So I hacked it to make the binary suid root, added
setreuid(0) and setreuid(<cyrus user uid>) in appropriate places. If anybody
has a better suggestion, I'm open to it.

I like what I've seen with the IMAP package so far - now the scalability
issue is what I am exploring. The one thing where each message is split into
separate files has me wondering about file I/O traffic, avail file
descriptors, locking issues, etc - and especially, how well it scales when
you start to hit 5-10,000 users.

-Dan Foster
Internet: dsf@frontiernet.net