HOWTO for a simple install of Cyrus

[Paul Iadonisi]

On Sun, 2004-03-21 at 19:03, Tom Diehl wrote:

[snip]

> Does cyrus use some kind of non-standard mailbox format?? If it does it is
> crap and should not be used. uw-imap for all of its warts at least uses a
> standard mailbox format called mbox.

  Is mbox actually an standard, or just a defacto standard?  Just
curious.  Same question with regards to Maildir.
  Really, what I'm asking, is, does it really matter?  As long as the
IMAP protocol offered by the server complies with the IMAP standard, it
shouldn't really matter what's on the backend.  Heck, for a really high
end mailserver supporting hundreds of thousands or even millions of
mailboxes, even a database backend (Oracle, DB2, Postresql, whatever)
might make sense.
  Well, in some cases it does matter what the back end format is, but
cyrus is most definitely designed to be run in a 'sealed server' type
environment, i.e: no local unix accounts for users.  Though you CAN
configure it to use pam so that creating a Unix user is all that is
needed (aside from creating the actual mailbox if you don't enable the
autocreate option).
  Anyhow, in answer to your questions, the format is probably closest to
the maildir format.  There is one directory per mailbox and one message
per file.  It differs from the Maildir format in that names of the files
are simple numbers followed by a dot (e.g.: 1025.) and there is no
dependency on inode numbers, so you don't need to run anything special
after a restore operation (at least not to deal with the differing
inodes after restore).  The format of the actual message files, I
believe, is identical to Maildir.  Same as mbox without the leading
colon-less 'From' line and with only one message per file.
  There have been debates ad-nauseum about the benefits/drawbacks of
Maildir vs. mbox.  I won't go into that here.  But basically, if you're
a Maildir partisan, cyrus' format is just fine.  If you're more of an
mbox fan, well, you might not like it.  But personally, I see no reason
to reject cyrus based solely on its mailbox format.
  Check out news://comp.mail.sendmail and in particular
http://anfi.homeunix.net/ for information on integrating sendmail with
cyrus.
-- 
-Paul Iadonisi
 Senior System Administrator
 Red Hat Certified Engineer / Local Linux Lobbyist
 Ever see a penguin fly?  --  Try Linux.
 GPL all the way: Sell services, don't lease secrets