[Mailman-Users] Pine file

[Brad Knowles]

At 5:30 PM -0500 2003/07/21, Juan Nicolas Bernal Yhama wrote:

>  I installed the mailman for a big server in my university.

	Great!  Glad to hear it!

>  the mail server of de university has 1800 accounts.
>  I want to install an imap server with squirrelmail because this have
>  others features and it is posible access with pine.
>  My users use webmail and pine simulteneously.
>  Is posible convert the INBOX, SENT and TRASH directories to standart mail
>  format !?? or to use pine for access the mailman server !?

	Unfortunately, what mail server you use for the University is not 
really relevant to mailman.  As a mailing list manager, mailman 
should be useable with virtually any standards-compliant mail server, 
and any standards-compliant MUA.

	The particular IMAP server you install should not be relevant, 
because the only interface between mailman and the outside world is 
through the web (mostly user interaction), or through the SMTP 
protocol (mail servers talking to each other).  Mailman does not know 
anything about the IMAP protocol.


	I would suggest doing more research on IMAP, and finding an 
IMAP-related mailing list or newsgroup on which to ask these 
questions.

	Myself, I found WU-IMAP (Washington University) to be 
easy-to-install, and supported a wide variety of mailbox formats, 
etc....  However, WU-IMAP does not scale well, and 1800 users may be 
too much for it.  In that case, you may want to consider Courier (a 
complete mail server package, including an IMAP server) or 
Courier-IMAP (just the IMAP server part), or perhaps Cyrus.

	Courier and Courier-IMAP are definitely more difficult to install 
than WU-IMAP, but they do scale better.  However, they do not scale 
as well as Cyrus (all major commercial IMAP server packages I know of 
are based on Cyrus), although Cyrus is even more difficult to install.

	For your site, you may need to choose between 
Courier/Courier-IMAP and Cyrus, depending on your particular needs. 
I'd suggest starting big (with Cyrus), and if it turns out to be too 
difficult for you, step back and try Courier or Courier-IMAP instead.

	You could use WU-IMAP for a small prototype server, but I fear 
that it would not handle 1800 users.  Trust me -- you don't want to 
be in a situation where you've chosen a particular package, gotten 
half way into moving all the users over to it, only to find it can't 
scale with you and you need to re-do the entire project with a 
different package.  Been there, done that, still have the singed 
hairs to prove it.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles at skynet.be>

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
     -Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.

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