[Zarafa] Possible to use an external dovecot server?

[Robert Scheck]

Hello Ronald,

On Tue, 04 May 2010, Ronald J. Yacketta wrote:
> Is it possible to split out the mail piece of zarafa so that it uses an 
> external dovecot server? Currently have all emails being sent via our 
> qmail server, but need to wrap my head around using our current dovecot 
> server. Have read that one could use fetchmail, unfortunately this is 
> not a viable solution with close to 3,000 end users as well as the 
> possible duplication of mail directories and email on two servers.

right now, this is not possible.

Zarafa uses everywhere MAPI which isn't IMAP even the four letters are the
same just in another order. With MAPI every regular e-mail gets splitted up
into many socalled properties which are saved in the MySQL database; that's
the very short form at least.

There are no plans by Zarafa to make Zarafa able reading IMAP stores rather
just the MAPI stores on which they actually really depend on. But Zarafa
doesn't strictly exclude the possibility of a IMAP storage for e-mails for
the (far) future - if recently I got one of the Zarafa employees right.

But what I don't get in your scenario is, why you need Dovecot? I don't
know QMail exactly, but you can make QMail delivering e-mails via .forward
or LMTP to Zarafa. And Zarafa provides a socalled gateway for IMAP and POP3
for the users. Yes, of course this isn't that perfect like Dovecot or Cyrus
IMAPd, because it's not a classical IMAP server and it doesn't support all
the funky IMAP extensions some IMAPd servers do. But the gateway is really
usable for most cases.

Hope that helps you? Note, IANAZE (I Am Not A Zarafa Employee).


Greetings,
  Robert
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/zarafa/attachments/20100504/fc251209/attachment.bin