[Dovecot] IMAP and webmail applications

[Dan Wang]

i thought squirrelmail would be way too much of an overkill for my needs
also but i went for it.  i'm using debian and i got the squirrelmail
package installed and working within 15 minutes.  what really makes life
easy is that squirrelmail comes with a configuration utility
(squirrelmail-configure).  it was very easy to get things configured
without worry about a lot of conf files :)  i also like the many plugins
that people have created for squirrelmail.  it's also very simple to add
these plugins into squirrelmail using squirrelmail-configure.

i had originally been ssh and mutt to check my mail, but i decided it be
nice to have a web front-end and squirrelmail /apache /dovecot /procmail
/spamassassin /gotmail /getmail /fetchyahoo have been a good mix for me.

the hardest part for me was figuring out procmail and not squirrelmail :)

my 2 cents,
dan

> I've been hunting around for a webmail application other than
> squirrelmail for reasons that really don't matter.
>
> But I'm seeing that a lot of these applications tend to sometimes access
> servers via IMAP, but they always seem to have a touch more information
> needed than might be for an IMAP session.
>
> An example is openwebmail.  It authenticates very similar to how dovecot
> authenticates, with a userdb and passdb specifications.  It reads
> directly off the disk for some of it's activities.
>
> As for squirrelmail, they seem to want a lot of information regarding
> the mail architecture (mbox, maildir, folder locations...) and I don't
> really see where this could come into play with an IMAP implimentation.
>
> So, not actually having read all 82 pages of RFC 2060 (but I did print
> them!), I'm trying to see what I might miss if I were to attempt a web
> mail application that was based entirely upon IMAPv4 with the only
> information known prior to connection is the server name.  Kind of like
> my mail client.
>
> Will I get into trouble with mail directories/folders if I start
> accessing different IMAP servers other than dovecot?  Can I discover
> this without any hints from the user?
>
> I'm not sure exactly what I'm asking for here, other than some thoughts
> on what I might have to watch out for or do without (when comparing to
> squirrelmail as an example).  I know I'll have to do something different
> if someone wants an addressbook, but I'm not there yet.
>