Why ISP's don't use IMAP

On Sat, 19 Jul 2003, Eric Lee Green wrote:

> Because the only imap server that'll serve old-fashioned single-file mail

Dovecot can also use mbox.

And GNU mailutils (which I don't know progress of anymore) supports IMAP
and mbox.

> slows things to a crawl on the server it's running on. The other imap
> servers out there require Maildir-format mail folders, which chew up
> your inodes like crazy and thus aren't suitable for an ISP's mail
> server.

With big disks, I don't consider that a problem. For example, a common
default is to have one inode for every 4096 bytes.

What's your definition of an ISP's mail server? (How many users? How many
messages?)

(By the way, I maintain a POP3 server project; it uses mbox, but one day I
may code in maildir support too.)

Jeremy C. Reed
http://bsd.reedmedia.net/