[plug] good mail server?

[Craig Ringer]

> Courier-imap has a few weirdies: occasionally I get some control
> characters in an email that seem to throw it.  unicode stuff in the
> email address or header etc.  The mail client (evo, squirrelmail and
> pine tried) then cannot read, delete or otherwise manipulate what is in
> the mail queue until it is identified (difficult in a large mailbox) and
> removed.

Sounds like Eudora. "Downloaing ma[@#$!~!@#$@<this program has performed 
an illegal operation....>". I don't want to deal with anything that has 
issues with charsets etc.

> Doesnt play nice with multiple evolution connections as the same user
> (deletions in one do not show as deleted in another).  I read and delete
> a 100 emails at work, come home and fire up evo there and they all show
> as unread.

Odd. The delete flag should be stored on a message at the server. Sounds 
dodgy anyway, esp. if it didn't happen with UW.

> uw-imap didnt like multiple connections at the same time: seemed to be
> single threaded.

Wow. That just doesnt' make sense, IMAP is generally a near-permanant 
connection. I could understand a very basic POP3 server being single 
threaded - but it'd only be able to support a very few users. It makes 
zero sense for an IMAP daemon. Are you sure it isn't supposed to be 
started on a per-connection basis from xinetd or something?

This isn't sounding at all good so far unfortunately. Cyrus is a bastard 
to install and administer, has a custom mail spool interface, keeps 
databases on the mail spool that can get corrupted and are hard to 
recover, and is known to be very picky about MIME parsing. It sounds 
like Courier has some charset handing issues, and from what you say UW 
is not really useable.

Is there a good OSS IMAP server for linux, or am I likely to have to 
license a commercial one to get one that works reliably and can be 
administered reasonably? Or am I simply misunderstanding the nature of 
the available servers?

Craig Ringer