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Hey everyone. Thought I'd share a few things that i've learned as well as ask a few questions.

My most recent task has been setting up a email server that our clients will use to send and receive email.
At this point, the server is working nicely and im learning a whole bunch of things.

However, one part I overlooked was the part about my users using this server for retrieving email. When I look back on it, there are two options really: POP and IMAP.

When I partioned this server, I created a large /var/spool/mail directory because from past experience, that is where the users email will be held. Upon researching and chatting with people, IMAP came highly recommend. However, imap uses maildir to store email. This generally are held in $HOME/inbox or $HOME/mail (Which ever is decided)

What i've realized is that i've pretty much locked myself into using POP for retrieving email. Reason is that my /home parition is not large enough to hold email for our users and it is definitely not big enough to hold email as the company grows. I guess this was a lesson that I will learn from.

In the aftermath, I would still like to incorporate a mail server using IMAP of some sort. So down the road, im going to look into see how I can upgrade or move from POP to IMAP.

Just thought i'd show my growing pains. :)

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Nothing like a crappy Monday. I came in this morning, worked out a bunch of problems with the mail server and was feeling good. I was getting ready to setup qpopper on the server when management laid this on me:

"We'd like to eventually go to IMAP. Can you set that up?" I wanted to scream because last week they were saying, "No, no. Just setup POP."

So here I am, almost completely done with the server and now they want to switch to IMAP?!?
Which means, if I have read correctly, that I may have to start over, due to the requirments for IMAP, being that they use 'maildir' correct? Which are held in $HOME/MAIL or $HOME/INBOX for example.

With that in mind, the partition scheme on the server was layed out for a POP setup: I have a large /var/spool partition to hold all the mail (and I was planning for future growth).

So, will someone just lay it down plainly? Am I up a creek? Or is there soemthing I can do to salavage this?

Once I have a fix for this or whatever, im going to voice my opinion strongly with management and all the sh!t they change...

Sorry, im just quite pissed this morning and i need to say something...

In the meantime, anyone care to add their opinions and recommendations?

Thanks guys.

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[|MiNi0n|]

In the long run the choice to go IMAP will pay off immensely. In the short term it sux for you because you've now got extra work. That being said, practice makes perfect. There's nothing like tearing everything down you've done and putting it back up in terms of learning experience.

Think of it this way, IMAP will make your life easier long term so ignore the short term pain.

Yay IMAP :D

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Thanks Minion. I guess I needed to just hear it. :)

Ok...since I have ya hear, I need to revamp my partition scheme for my server.

Can you suggest some partition schemes, since im going to be using imap now?
I have roughly 70 gigs to work with.

Thanks..

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