IMAP (cyrus or ?) or POP (dovecot or ?)

[Les Mikesell]

On Sun, 2006-04-02 at 13:46, Dan Thurman wrote:

> oh..  I guess dovecot is an IMAP capable server
> so this is fine.  I guess I was trying to do some
> message management issues that IMAP itself is not
> capable of doing maybe.

Imap doesn't handle deliveries or any decision-making process.

> What I was actually looking for in retrospect, was
> that I wanted to setup rule based filtering so that
> when a message arrives inbound, the rule-based filters
> would route the messages to the proper in-house email
> server and yet intermally to the email server in particular
> to deliver the message to the proper user defined email
> folders using the IMAP structure.

If you use procmail as your local delivery agent (the
default with fedora) you can forward elsewhere or
deliver to specified mbox or maildir locations according
to rules you put in .procmailrc.  With cyrus you have to
use its own program as the delivery agent and a similar
but different filtering agent called sieve.

> As I have it right now, I have exchange as my main central
> email repository and I have to have at least one of my Outlook
> email clients open (i.e. running) so that when it pop's messages
> (IMAP or POP) from a remote email server, the user-defined rules
> examines the message headers and moves the message(s) to the
> user defined email folders for better management/organization
> of thousands of messages received inbound.

If you only have one email client it is reasonable to handle
rules there.  You should be able to move to/from any
imap folder including across servers.  It gets ugly if you
try to do this with multiple clients so the rule handling
can get out of sync and depend on which one ran first.

> Is there something like this available for Fedora (linux) so that
> I can be weaned away from depending solely on Exchange?

Either dovcot or cyrus imap should work fine as your
message repository.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com