[TriLUG] Upgrades, mailservers and decisions, oh my!

[Tanner Lovelace]

Greetings everyone,

This Saturday we're planning on attempting to upgrade the
main trilug mail/web/imap/mailman/mysql/kerberos/ldap server
to a newer distribution of Linux.  This will undoubtedly cause
some outages of service.  At the present time, I can't tell you
when or how long, but I'll update as soon as I can.  Hopefully
it won't be that long.

One of the things we're thinking about doing, however, 
could have an impact on users of the IMAP server so I
wanted to run it by the people on the list who use the server
and see what they have to say.

When I originally setup the imap server almost 3 years ago
now, Jon Carnes suggested I look into using Cyrus imap.
Based on several things (including my own lack of knowledge
at the time about imap servers and lack of linux integration
in Cyrus itself) we instead decided to go to a custom version of 
WU-Imap that was highly tuned for our needs.  This has worked 
quite well for the past three years. However, since it is custom 
compiled for us (by me) and because I will be stepping down 
from the SC at the end of my current term in May, I would 
prefer to move to a standard install of something to make 
administration for future SC members easier.  In point of fact,
I believe Cyrus IMAP and linux distributions have matured
enough such that it would be a very simple matter to set it
up and us it instead.  I recently did this on my personal
imap server and can attest to its simplicity.

However, switching to Cyrus would have several changes that
users would notice.  Here they are:

1. In our current IMAP server setup, you can have folders at the
same level as INBOX.  Under Cyrus all folders must be "under"
INBOX.
2. In our current IMAP server, a folder can either contain messages
or other folders.  In Cyrus a folder main contain both.
3. The Cyrus server would support public folders (i.e. we could
direct the trilug mailing list to a public imap folder and give people
access to it.
4. Procmail and Cyrus can coexist, but it is a hack and we would
probably want to encourage people to move from procmail to sieve.
(This probably wouldn't be as bad as it sounds, though, since
procmail with our current server is also a hack, and one based
on an original hack for Cyrus.)

So, basically, what I'd like to hear from the IMAP users is what
do you think?  Transfering mail from one IMAP server to a different
one is absolutely no problem at all.  Everything would show up
on the new server just as it does on the current server, with the
exception that all folders would be under INBOX instead of at the
same level.  So, thoughts?  Comments?  Questions?

Thanks,
Tanner