tlug: IMAP

[Frank Bennett <bennett@example.com>]

In the faculty where I work, most people use Pop3 to access mail
from the server, and relay their outgoing mail through the
server, which spoofs the mail and envelope with its own address
details and the user's account name.

Pop3 is okay for academics who access from a single machine in
their offices, but it is awkward for anyone with more than one
machine, a disaster for students who rely on a bevvy of
public-access machines to read their mail, and an administrative
headache for me --- I have given up explaining how mail dropped
onto an open-access machine becomes accessible to anyone who
drops by.  Windows is a real curse in this environment: just
friendly enough to be dangerous.

I want to shift the system over (optionally at first, then by
main force once a critical mass of users know their way around
the New System) to IMAP.  I have looked at Cyrus-IMAP, and it
seems to provide what I'm after: a working IMAP 4.1
implementation that is scaleable, administrable from afar, and
suitable for running on a server with no ordinary user accounts.

Before I put in the time required to install the beast, however:

  (1) Is there anything other than IMAP that I should know about?

  (2) Can users read mail offline via IMAP, or will they still
      need to rely on Pop3 for that?

  (3) The docs for Cyrus-IMAP warn about char-table problems:
      does anyone have experience using this IMAP version with
      Japanese text?  It's listed at a lot of sites here in
      Japan, which bodes well, but if there are problems I'd
      better know about 'em before my colleagues' communiques
      start being ground into a fine powder.

Any advice greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
-- 
-x80
Frank G Bennett, Jr         @@
Faculty of Law, Nagoya Univ () email: bennett@example.com
Tel: +81[(0)52]789-2239     () WWW:   http://rumple.soas.ac.uk/~bennett/
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