Suggestions please for what POP or IMAP servers to use

[Heiko Wundram (Beenic)]

Am Freitag, 14. Dezember 2007 23:14:32 schrieb Ted Mittelstaedt:
> As I said I did a survey of all known web clients earlier this
> year that did not require a specific server - I might have even posted it
> to the list.  But I guess that's a challenge to some people to "prove" I
> don't know what
> I'm talking about. ;-)
>
> If you feel you must avoid "c-client" you can do it
> the following way:
>
> 1) The webmail that comes with SquirrelMail I would be surprised if it
> uses it - but, that webmail is inseparable from the SquirrelMail SMTP
> server and cannot be installed separately.  I didn't test it because of
> that.

Sorry to say this, but you do not know what you're talking about. SquirrelMail 
is a stand-alone webmail application, which has nothing to do and is not 
affiliated with any form of SMTP server.

Check out SquirrelMail:

http://www.squirrelmail.org/

Quoting from there:

"""
What is SquirrelMail?

SquirrelMail is a standards-based webmail package written in PHP. It includes 
built-in pure PHP support for the IMAP and SMTP protocols, and all pages 
render in pure HTML 4.0 (with no JavaScript required) for maximum 
compatibility across browsers. It has very few requirements and is very easy 
to configure and install. SquirrelMail has all the functionality you would 
want from an email client, including strong MIME support, address books, and 
folder manipulation.
"""

As I explained earlier, SquirrelMail uses the PHP IMAP extension, which in 
turn uses cclient to access IMAP mailboxes, if you don't use the pure PHP 
IMAP implementation bundled with it (which I didn't know it had until 
rechecking their site just now; all the setups of SquirrelMail I did so far 
used the IMAP extension directly and there was a dependency on it earlier 
AFAIR).

Pretty much the same thing goes for IMP (i.e., the Horde WebMail plugin); I'll 
save you the link to the page now, I guess you can use Google.

Anyway, what you're probably referring to is the Courier webmail module 
(called somewhat similarly) SqWebMail 
(http://www.courier-mta.org/sqwebmail/), which really does not use cclient, 
as it accesses the mailboxes (in Maildir format) directly, but this comes at 
the price that the WebMail-server (and application) must have some form of 
read/write _filesystem access_ to all user's mailboxes being able to access 
the WebMail application, which generally is not what I as a responsible admin 
want to have; either, all mail accounts have to share the same UID/GID as the 
web application, or the web application requires some form of mod_suid 
functionality, which is not okay in either case.

As I said earlier, it's a felt fact (I have no hard evidence to support this) 
that SquirrelMail and IMP are the most commonly used and installed WebMail 
applications out in the wild, and you'll find almost no mail-server 
administrator who hasn't heard of these two. And both of them (can) use 
cclient indirectly through PHP, and at least until the last time I set up a 
mail-server with IMP (which is around a year ago) didn't have a pure PHP 
implementation of the IMAP protocol.

-- 
Heiko Wundram
Product & Application Development