Re: imap servers

[patl Phoenix Volant ORG]

On  6-Jan-01 at 14:25, Pawel Salek (pawsa@theochem.kth.se) wrote:
> 
> W 2001.01.06 19:39:09 +0100 Nerijus Baliunas napisał(a):
> > > does anyone have any recommendations for imap servers? I'm having some
> > > trouble between WU's imap-2000 and fetchmail. I've heard good things
> > about Cyrus, any opinions?
> > 
> > Yes, go for cyrus or courier.
> 
> One should remember that cyrus (IIRC) requires that the mailboxes are
> accessed exclusively via IMAP, it stores them in own format.

Just a nit - it also supports POP3.

But your fundamental point is correct - you must use a mail client
that supports IMAP4 and/or POP3 to access Cyrus mailboxes.  (Your
client may also support other formats for your locally-saved mail,
of course.)

Personally, I consider this to be a feature.  It is one of the
little design decisions that make Cyrus less of a security worry.
Since it owns all of the mailboxes, the IMAP/POP daemons and the
delivery process normally execute as a specific unprivileged pseudo-
user.  As far as I know, no security holes have ever been found
in Cyrus; but even if one were found, it would only provide access
to the 'cyrus' user, not to root or any real user.  And if you are
worried about that being a stepping stone to fuller access, you can
run the whole Cyrus system in a minimal chrooted environment (or a
'jail' in FreeBSD and other systems that support them.)



-Pat