Managing IMAP

IMP

Overview

IMP (http://www.horde.org), one of the Horde software projects, is a web-based IMAP client implemented in PHP. IMP is freely available. The latest version is Version 2.0.11, which is available at ftp://ftp.horde.org/imp/. IMP is IMAP4 compliant and works with both the UW and Cyrus servers.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Strengths

IMP is open source and free of cost. It’s built based on freely available open source components and open standards. IMP performs better with less overhead than a scripted CGI, because it’s implemented in PHP. It includes locale support for several languages, including English, German, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese.

Weaknesses

IMP was, until recently, somewhat challenging to install on non-Linux platforms because of the variety of packages it required. That’s been fixed now, and IMP has very few if any requirements other than the obvious PHP-enabled web server and an IMAP server. There have been several reports, however, that an unmodified IMP server doesn’t easily scale larger than 10,000 users or so because of performance problems. Your mileage may vary.

Requirements

IMP can be built on any Unix platform. It has been tested and is known to run on the following platforms:

AIX 4.3.2

BSDi

Digital Unix 4.0d/4.0e

FreeBSD 3.0 and up

Linux (Debian 2.1 and 2.2)

Linux (Red Hat 5.2 and higher)

Linux (Slackware)

Solaris 2.6 and higher

Windows NT 4.0

Horde

The Horde module, the core of all Horde software packages, must be installed on your system as part of your ...