I've been doing a little reading up, and just want to run something past those of you who are familiar with courier.

Would it be possible for me to create a dedicated Mail server using CourierIMAP (with LDAP), which copies all outgoing email to the relevant "Sent Items" folder?

Would it also be possible to stop the removal of emails from the server - IE, if the an email is deleted in the email client, the action is ignored by the Courier server? Or does IMAP just flag deleted messages as "deleted", without removing them from the server?

This is not Courier/IMAP's job.

I'd configure the mail agent to do what you want, either sendmail or exim or qmail (whatever you are using). Look for archiving receipies with those programs and you will be successful.

Good luck

K<o>
P.S.: Yes, Google is a dumb search engine, that does not find anything, if you don't know the right keywords in the right context. Not your fault!

Thanks, but that doesn't really answer either of my questions.

I'm pretty sure its possible for Courier's ESMTP module to create a copy of sent email in the maildir from certain threads I've read online. I'm simply looking for explicit confirmation that this can be done.

I've also found a python program on sourceforge that can read maildirs and back them up periodically to gzipped mboxes. Which is suitable for my needs.

However, as for my second question - yes, it would be Courier-IMAP's job to handle deleted email. Again, I'm looking for confirmation that the IMAP protocol doesn't actually delete the email but flags it as deleted and keeps a copy of it. From my understanding of IMAP from using the PHP IMAP functions, you mark emails as deleted, and then execute an "expunge" method to clean out the deleted emails. Its this method I would like to bypass.