what is IMAP

IMAP, fully documented in RFC 3501, was designed to provide a robust, mobile mail delivery and access mechanism. For more detail on the protocol and how it functions on the network layer, or for additional information on the numerous specification options, please consult the RFC documentation.


POP and IMAP tend to be grouped together or compared, which is a bit unfair since they are dissimilar in many ways. POP was created as a simple mail delivery vehicle, which it does very well. Users connect to the server and obtain their messages, which are then, ideally, deleted from the server. IMAP takes an entirely different approach. It acts as the keeper of the messages and provides a framework in which the users can efficiently manipulate the stored messages. While administrators and users can configure POP to store the messages on the server, it can quickly become inefficient since a POP client will download all old messages each time the mail is queried. This can get messy quickly, if the user is receiving any quantity of email. For users who do not need any kind of portability, or receive little email, POP is probably an acceptable choice, but those seeking greater functionality will want to use IMAP.


Once you've decided that IMAP is for you, there are two primary options. The two main flavors are Cyrus IMAP and the University of Washington IMAP server. Both follow the RFC specification for IMAP and have their advantages and disadvantages. They also use different mailbox formats and therefore cannot be mixed. One key difference between the two is found in Cyrus IMAP. It does not use /etc/passwd for its mail account database, so the administrator does not have to specially add mail users to the system password file. This is more secure option for system administrators, because creating accounts on systems can be construed as a security risk. However, the ease of configuration and installation of UW IMAP often makes it more appealing. In this chapter, we'll primarily focus on the two most common IMAP servers: UW IMAP, because of its popularity and ease of installation, and Cyrus IMAP, because of its additional security features.

 
Once the server software has been downloaded and decompressed, it can be installed. However, because of UW-IMAP's large portability database, it does not support GNU automake, meaning that there isn't a configure script. Instead, a Makefile that relies on user-specified parameters is used. There are many supported operating systems, including a number of Linux distributions. Here's a list of a few of the supported Linuxes distributions:

# ldb   Debian Linux
# lnx   Linux with traditional passwords and crypt( ) in the C library
#        (see lnp, sl4, sl5, and slx)
# lnp   Linux with Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM)
# lrh   RedHat Linux 7.2
# lsu   SuSE Linux
# sl4   Linux using -lshadow to get the crypt( ) function
# sl5   Linux with shadow passwords, no extra libraries
# slx   Linux using -lcrypt to get the crypt( ) function

The lrh version will probably work on newer Red Hat versions as well. If your distribution isn't listed, try one of the matching generic options. lnp is a good guess for most modern versions of Linux.


To begin the installation of the Cyrus server, download and decompress the latest version. You will need to download both the IMAP and SASL packages.
SASL is the authentication mechanism used by Cyrus IMAP, and will need to be configured and installed first. It is easily built using the standard "configure-make" order.
vlager# cd cyrus-sasl-2.1.15 
vlager# ./configure 
loading cache ./config.cache
checking host system type... i686-pc-linux-gnu
.
creating saslauthd.h
Configuration Complete. Type 'make' to build.
vlager# make 
make  all-recursive
make[1]: Entering directory `/tmp/cyrus-sasl-2.1.15'

Assuming the compile is completed without failure and you've successfully executed the make install, you can now proceed to configuring and installing the Cyrus IMAP server itself.