Re: Suggestions please for what POP or IMAP servers to use

On Dec 14, 2007 11:45 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-freebsd-questions@xxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@xxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Andrew Falanga
Sent: Friday, December 14, 2007 7:35 PM
To: Ted Mittelstaedt
Cc: Rob; FreeBSD Questions
Subject: Re: Suggestions please for what POP or IMAP servers to use


On Dec 13, 2007 10:06 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The developer is very adamant about writing dovecot strictly to
the letter of the IMAP specification. He's also discovered many
of the popular clients have bugs, and are unable to work (or at
least have issues) with an IMAP server that goes purely by the rules.

He refused to "break" his software to work around bugs on the
client side, but ultimately compromised by writing in
work-arounds that you can enable in the config file. You can
enable them all if you like.


Which is a really dumb attitude since the dovecot developer was
not the author of the IMAP standard and probably was in diapers
when the standard was first written:


I agree with your sentiment that, "who can use a server that no client can
connect to?" However, that being said, why write a standard you don't
intend to adhere too? It's a crying shame that folks write standards for
things like IMAP and e-mail client providers don't follow them. I wished
more people were like this fellow who writes Dovecot! If more people were
strict about server interfaces, then perhaps more vendors would
write their
code to the standard instead of those who write the standards
enabling poor
compliance by "dumbing" down their servers.


It's a chicken and egg problem.

There's nothing wrong with writing an extremely strict standard.
The issue is the implementation.

If your server implementation is so strict that most clients have
difficulty, then users will find something else and your standard
will end up on the dustbin.

It's better to start out with a strict standard and a forgiving
server implementation, then as it falls into mainstream use, work
with the client developers to correct their stuff.

You've effectively described dovecot here. Its codebase is perhaps
designed to be very strict, however the same codebase also includes
configurable 'workarounds' (enabled by default in many distros) for
clients that are not up to spec. They're trivial to toggle and well
documented.

So, this meets both criteria that it will "just work" with clients
now, and the clients themselves could theoretically (good luck with
Outlook) fix their code in the future. As far as I'm concerned, it's
a fairly ideal environment, and I'm glad the developer has gone to the
trouble to 1) stick to standards in the core code and 2) made a point
of documenting and providing workarounds for buggy clients.

I personally use dovecot (+postfix) with great success. Dovecot is
modern, featureful, well documented, and its SASL impementation is
particularly useful with postfix. I've had no difficulty with clients
not being able to connect.


We don't want to end up like Microsoft - which writes very lax
and contradictory standards, then makes up strict implementations.
Then every new release of their stuff breaks things.


Ted
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