8.1.1 University of Washington IMAP server
The University of Washington's IMAP server is very
common on open source Unixes. If you are running Linux, it
may very well be using this server. For brevity this IMAP
server is often called the imap-uw, UoW IMAP, etc.
The official release of imap-uw manages to maintain
compatibility with the traditional /var/mail style of
mailbox storage that is common in the Unix world. In order
to do this, it often creates "place holder" messages which
the imapd daemon will ignore but are in the file store
none-the-less. If you use this server, TWIG should not
show these place holders. However, remember to not access
those files directly.
If you use qmail and/or Debian Linux, take note of the
qmail patches to imapd-uw. They alter the above behavior
so that the imapd is able to understand qmail's maildir
format. While this is certainly helpful, it can also cause
problems with TWIG's ability to retrieve a list of folders
from the imapd. The patches have a bug in them at the time
of this writing (September 1999) which cause the number of
folders to be reported incorrectly. The results are that
TWIG will list every folder twice. It is recommended that
the imapd-uw software be installed without this patch and
that qmail simply deliver emails to the traditional
/var/mail location and format.
One more behavior glitch should be noted. This server will
only allow one concurrent write-capable session. All other
attempts to access any folder will be demoted to read-only
access. This is simply the nature of this IMAP server. In
practice, this only becomes an issue if a user is accessing
their email via TWIG on two computers at once (or using TWIG
and pine at the same time, etc.)
Common Settings
Some common settings for TWIG when using this IMAP server
include the following:
- $config["imap_path"] = "mail/";
- ...or...
- $config["imap_path"] = "";
- ...or...
- $config["imap_path"] = "Mail/";
- ...or something similar, depending upon your
compile-time settings.
- $config["imap_sentfolder"] = "sent-mail";
- This one is really a matter of preference. The string
"sent-mail" is often used due to its compatibility with
pine.
- $config["imap_cyrus"] = 0;
- This is only set to "1" when using
Cyrus and no shared
folders. Cyrus and imapd-uw are mutually excusive.
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