Managing IMAP

Chapter 18. IMAP Tools

A great advantage of embracing open source and open standard software is that all those nagging little—and some not-so-little—features that you would like to have, but don’t, can be addressed by a handful of free software tools. Some of the tools are invasive, patching the source to your server to get their work done. Others rely only on the IMAP protocol to get their work done and would work equally well with closed source IMAP servers. All of them, however, could be used to provide a bridge between the capabilities of your server and the demands of your workload.

IMAP Administration Tools

Few things can positively affect your ability to manage your mail server like a good set of administration tools. We’ve found a few packages that could easily be the Leatherman Tool for your IMAP server—something you keep close by so you can use it on a moment’s notice to perform some random act of maintenance. We’ve split these tools into two types: general server administration, and those that would be used in different load-balancing schemes.

General IMAP Server Administration

Those of our readers who are transitioning from POP3 mail servers to IMAP know that there’s not a whole lot to using POP3 to administer user mailboxes. Nearly anything you might want to do in POP3 is easily accomplished by telnetting to the POP3 port and issuing commands manually. Because IMAP is a much richer protocol than POP3, there’s much to be gained by having an intermediate piece of software ...