Managing IMAP

IMAP Clustering

Unfortunately, there is no comprehensive open source package that provides IMAP server clustering. We’ve avoided covering commercial software tools in this chapter, but in light of the lack of free clustering software, we’ll break the trend and mention one commercial product and one freely available package.

BLUETAIL Mail Robustifier

Author

Bluetail AB

URL

http://www.bluetail.com/products/

Major features

Adds load balancing, scalability, and fault tolerance to IMAP services.

Installation

http://www.bluetail.com/big/common/bmr11.pdf

Documentation

Available at Bluetail AB’s site: whitepaper (http://www.bluetail.com/big/common/wp11.pdf  ), overview (http://www.bluetail.com/big/common/wpm.pdf  ), and user manuals (http://www.bluetail.com/big/common/bmr11.pdf   ).

Status

Current version is 1.1 as of February 2000.

Licensing

Commercial (free 30-day trial available).

BLUETAIL Mail Robustifier is a software proxy system that adds load balancing, scalability, and fault tolerance to IMAP, POP, and SMTP services running on Unix platforms. The supported platforms are Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, and BSDi.

The software runs on a pair of dedicated proxy servers that sit between the IMAP server farm and the IMAP clients and load-balance traffic across the servers in the farm. If a proxy server dies, BLUETAIL fails over to the other node.

BLUETAIL adds scalability by allowing additional IMAP server machines to be added transparently while IMAP services are online. Likewise, ...