Managing IMAP

Chapter 12. UW System Administration

The UW IMAP server is so much of a plug-and-play package, there’s not a lot of system administration to talk about. A few things should be mentioned, though, so we’ll cover them before going on to bigger issues, like security.

General Issues

Some broad issues should be addressed up front. As we’ve mentioned several times already, you would probably have a perfectly good IMAP server setup if you just slapped the location of the prebuilt binary that probably came with your operating system into inetd.conf and ran it. Unix system administrators being what they are, however, we’d be remiss in our duties if we didn’t give you a handful of “nerd knobs” to tweak on the UW server, so here goes.

IMAP Alerts

The UW server supports IMAP alerts, motd type messages that all IMAP users see in their IMAP client when a connection to the server is first established.

To set up an alert, put the alert message text in the file /etc/imapd.alert.

Because many clients don’t handle IMAP alerts perfectly, keep the alert text down to one line. Also, keep in mind that the alert message is displayed every time a user connects to the server, so it’s best to use alerts only for critical messages.

Disabling the mbox Driver

If you compiled the UW server to support the mbox driver (it’s enabled by default), the server’s behavior when an INBOX is opened may not be what you expect or desire. With mbox support, when INBOX is opened, the server checks the user’s ...