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- Courier-IMAP is a server that provides IMAP access to Maildirs
- mailboxes. This IMAP server does NOT handle traditional mailbox files
- (/var/spool/mail, and derivatives), it was written for the specific
- purpose of providing IMAP access to Maildirs.
- The Courier-IMAP implements some extensions to the basic Maildir mail
- storage format in order to support some additional features, such as
- folders and "soft" quotas. This is done in a way that's backwards
- compatible with the standard Maildir users (although, of course, they
- will ignore the additional features). Other software that understands
- and uses the same Maildir extensions is SqWebMail, and maildrop.
- "Maildir" is a directory-based mail storage format originally introduced
- in the Qmail mail server, and adopted as an alternative mail storage
- format by both Exim and Postfix. Courier-IMAP is popular on
- Qmail/Exim/Postfix sites that are configured to use maildirs. The
- primary advantage of maildirs is that multiple applications can access
- the same maildir simultaneously without requiring any kind of locking
- whatsoever. It is a faster and more efficient way to store mail. It
- works particularly well over NFS, which has a long history of
- locking-related woes.
- It is part of the Courier mail server (http://www.courier-mta.org) but
- can be configured as a standalone IMAP server.
- Features include an extremely small memory footprint, abstract
- authentication modules (e.g. /etc/passwd, LDAP, PAM), virtual mailbox
- support, resource controls, SSL/TLS, and IPv6 support.
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