Uw-imap Configuration
 

Not sure what the most appropriate place to locate this post is, so mods please feel free to move this as needed.

So here's the deal. I've downloaded the latest version of washington.edu's IMAPD server and am preparing to put it to use. It's destined for a RH9 system which originally had users' mail going to /var/spool/mail/username. I subsequently reconfigured things so that mail would be delivered to /home/username/mail/inbox. I then installed and configured ipop3d to look to the users' home directories for their inbox rather than the default /var/spool/mail/username location. Since then my users have been receiving mail to and popping mail from their own user directories without a hitch. This model allows me to regulate how much disk space is consumed at the user level by users who are leaving mail on the server, pushing large attachments, etc.

Now I would like to add imap service to those same accounts. Now I'm not sure who provides the imapd code that ships with RH9, but activating the existing daemon through xinetd works, but it shows all the inboxes as containing no messages through the imap service. This suggests to me that the imapd shipped with RH9 is looking at the /var/spool/mail/username location for mail. Not seeing any source nor any particularly useful configuration parameters for imapd, I decided to download a new imapd package and start from good source.

Enter UW-IMAPD. So now I have this codebase and would love to install it, but I wanted to make sure that I would be able to point the base path to the inbox to the new location just as I was able to do with ipop3d. It turns out that the UW-IMAPD source code is a complete jumbled mess with poor inline commenting. It's rather difficult to make heads or tails of exactly what's going on with opening a mailbox without getting into some serious bathroom reading.

So before I pull my remaining hair out trying to figure it out on my own, I thought I'd put forth the question in the open to find out if there is a simple solution for what I am after: an imap daemon that will store/fetch mail to/from a location within a user's own home directory.

Any tips would be appreciated!

- SK