Managing IMAP

Components of Cyrus and What They Do

Once you’ve built Cyrus, you’ll have the following programs.

imapd(8)

This is the IMAP server itself. It is invoked by inetd (8). In the next chapter, we’ll cover how to set up inetd to run imapd, and ensure that it functions correctly.

deliver (8)

This is the Cyrus mail delivery agent. deliver takes mail on standard input and delivers it to one or more Cyrus format mailboxes. It is also the pruning utility for the duplicate delivery database.

reconstruct(8)

The reconstruct utility rebuilds the indexes of any number of Cyrus mailboxes and reconstructs the global mailboxes database. reconstruct is at the core of any conversion system from other mailbox formats to Cyrus, as well as most disaster recovery strategies. Once you’ve rebuilt a quota-restricted mailbox with reconstruct, it’s a good idea to run quota –f to repair the appropriate quota root files.

cyradm(1)

This is Cyrus’s Tcl-based administrative control and scripting language. The interactive and scripting commands are different, and much if not all of what you can do in cyradm is also possible by spoofing the IMAP protocol from other languages if Tcl isn’t your cup of tea.

pwcheck (8)

Cyrus imapd runs as user cyrus, so authentication using shadow passwords isn’t directly available. pwcheck allows you to use shadow passwords on a non-Kerberized Cyrus system. pwcheck is a fairly robust hack that creates a for-cyrus-use-only named pipe that the root-owned pwcheck ...