Managing IMAP

WING

WING (Web IMAP and News Gateway) is an open source Apache/mod_perl system that allows users to access email held on an IMAP server using any web browser. WING is reliable and secure, and it scales. It’s built completely on open standards and open source components.

Overview

WING was designed and written by Malcolm Beattie at Oxford University to provide webmail services to all 30,000 of their users. Postscript slides describing Oxford University’s Herald mail cluster, which uses WING, are available at http://users.ox.ac.uk/~mbeattie/wing/.

WING is not trivial to set up. In its current state, it requires many other pieces of software to function and some familiarity with Apache/mod_perl, Perl and SQL. WING was developed primarily for Linux. Other platforms will have to go to extra work to install WING, and modifications of the source code might be necessary to obtain the full functionality experienced on Linux installations.

The software itself is well designed and written, but it is still a work in progress and there are a few rough edges. The interface in particular is somewhat spartan, which may be problematic for users used to glamorous webmail sites like Hotmail. In its favor, though, the software is easy to extend in functionality.

There are no major bottlenecks in large WING implementations, but the central database could potentially become a problem if the underlying system is not well optimized (see Chapter 16, Server Performance Tuning , before planning your WING ...