Qmail, Vpopmail and Binc

Two and a half years ago, when I first installed qmail, I can't say I did it properly. The reason for that is the over abundance of information on installing qmail. In the end I took a shortcut and followed the shupp's qmail toaster guide, something that definitely should not have been done.

This time I followed life with qmail and got off on the right track. After installation of qmail I spent sometime debating whether or not to install vpopmail. The fact that vpopmail installs passwords in clear text is a bit too much to stomach but after struggling with too many .qmail files I threw in the towel and decided to go ahead with vpopmail anyway.

The toaster guide and many other guides involve the creation of a separate vpopmailctl script or they run vpopmail as a standalone daemon not controlled by daemontools. Some other guides use xinetd! All that is unacceptable particularly since vpopmail will run very well under daemontools.

The next step of course is to install an IMAP server, and not having had a pleasent time of it with courier I settled on BincIMAP. It's shortcomings were discovered only after installation; the most annoying is that it follows a different standard for folder structre which they call IMAPdir. Unfortunately thunderbird does not like it either.

After a bit of a struggle I discovered that the alternative approach described in Life with BincIMAP can be made to work but to migrate all the existing mail boxes turned out to be a bit tedius (even though they numbered less than 20). Fortunately on linux, it only takes a couple of lines of shell scripts to take the boredom out of tedius tasks.