[Dovecot] Disable IMAP for certain users, but not Webmailer

[Bill Cole]

At 8:28 AM -0700 8/5/07, Don Russell  imposed structure on a stream 
of electrons, yielding:
>FORMER 03 | Baltasar Cevc wrote:
>>Hi everybody,
>>
>>I'm planning to set up our new mail system using the Dovecot mailbox
>>server. It mostly works fine yet (it's quite straigt forward to set up,
>>I'd say), but there's a thing I haven't been able to find out yet. We
>>provide POP3 access for all users, but want to restrict IMAP access to
>>some of them (because IMAP users tend to leave more messages on the
>>server, thus increasing storage needs).
>>
>>
>[snip]
>
>1 - storage is cheap - Costco sells a 1 TByte external drive for 
>approx $US 300. That holds a LOT of e-mail. The 500 GByte is less 
>than half that price.

Storage in most business environments costs a lot more than the price 
of consumer-grade disks. Physical disks are a minor component of the 
true cost of providing storage in an available, reliable, 
maintainable, restorable, flexible, and auditable manner.


>2 - why not enforce quotas? I assume you could set quotas by user.

Quotas are an administrative hassle even when they work technically. 
In many places they also are a poor proxy for the real policy need of 
retaining (and removing) mail based on age.


>POP users could opt to keep a copy on the server, so that doesn't 
>guarantee anything.

There are sites which handle that through policy which they enforce 
automatically and the use of Maildir. With Maildir, a script that 
removes messages once they've been retrieved and/or are older than a 
certain age is a pretty simple and efficient matter.

>I prefer IMAP because then I can access the same mail from different 
>clients computers...

IMAP certainly provides more flexibility for users, but sometimes 
that flexibility is not needed or is specifically unwanted.



-- 
Bill Cole                                  
bill at scconsult.com