On Thu, 15 Mar 2012 15:27:37 -0400 Terry Carmen articulated:
On 03/15/2012 03:06 PM, Steve Campbell wrote:
Firstly, this isn't meant to be critical, and I realize the subject line probably suggest criticism, so...
I was sort of forced into using dovecot as my imap/pop server due to upgrading 3 versions of OS on my mail servers. So far, that's not bad. What surprises me is that one of the first things I usually do whenever I start using different software is to purchase a book that seems to suit me. Searching all of the common places like amazon, ebay, etc for manuals turned up little to nothing on dovecot.
I'm wondering why and is this so new that people just haven't written books about it yet?
The one thing I'm a little critical of, though, is that trying to make heads or tails of dovecot by following the online documentation is a little problematic. I'm constantly jumping to another page and then back to the original page, and for the most part, I just don't know enough about it all yet to know what I'm looking for.
The best docs are on the wiki and this mailing list. If you find the information in the wiki to be lacking, the best thing you can do is find the solution yourself and/or on this mailing list, and then make a wiki entry so the next person will know how to solve the same problem you had.
Dovecot is a complex piece of software, and understanding some functionality requires reading the wiki, asking on the mailing list and/or examining the source code. You can also obtain paid support from these companies: http://dovecot.org/support.html
I'll be the first to admit that complex and specialized configurations are sometimes difficult to figure out, however this list has always been a tremendous amount of help.
The lack of truly informative documentation has been the Achilles' heel of open-source software since its inception. I feel your pain. I have always loved a hard copy, i.e. book documenting the subject I am studying. Jumping from screen to screen sucks, plus how do I highlight a passage on the monitor for future reference? There have been a few books written to document Postfix, but to the best of my knowledge, none exist for Dovecot.
-- Jerry ♔
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