# IMAP for qmail---bincimap?

## Woland

I want a good IMAP server to compliment my qmail setup.  uw-imap seems qmail unfriendly, and courier seems awfully big, and not 100% qmail compatable, and it seems needs xinetd, which I don't want to run.  So I am looking at bincimap, but there is no ebuild.

This is a home network, not a production server; so the fact that it is still beta software does not bother me too much---as long as it is solid, workable beta.  Does anyone have any experiance with it?   Any other advice about IMAP and qmail?

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## drtebi

Hello,

I have been trying to get courier-imap to work for 4 days now  :Sad:  I mean OK, it works now, but I still have lots of problems with it, especially I still cannot figure out how to have it use vpopmail.

So, I tried the bincimap alternative. I tried it first on my server at home, and I must say it was a dream to install compared to the courier-imap. It pretty much worked out of the box! The only thing I had to change was to set 

```
allow plain auth in non ssl = "yes"
```

in the bincimap.conf file, unless you only want to support secure connections or whatever that was for  :Shocked:  . Then you can test it by running the "run" script -- but keep in mind that you need to have the deamontools installed for this, which you probably have anyway with qmail.

If it's working as expected, you would then probably setup the a link in the /service directory to this "run" script.

From my experience, it seems to be a bit slower then courier-imap, but I can't say that for sure, it just appeared to be. And further, I have not yet tested it with vpopmail on my home server (on the production server it would not work, but I believe there is some other problem deep inside there somewhere  :Sad:  )

Try it, give it a shot...

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## Woland

Thanks for the reply.

Currently I am trying to come up with an e-build for Binc, and I am glad you alerted me to the ssl issue.

There are a few other issues with binc installation:

1.  It wants to put everythig into /opt/bincimap, which may be fine for an RPM based distro but does not fit into the gentoo sceme of things

2.  The default INBOX is Maildir, gentoo uses .maildir

3.  Check the size of your installed binaries.  The auto-install script does not strip them, and they are comparitivly huge (20MB or so)  Try stripping them of the debugging symbols:  they shrink almost a 100 fold.  This may be the performance issue---especially if you are low on RAM,

I will add the change above to my ebuild.  SSL suport requires a signed certificate for each user, and may be a bit of a security overkill---unless you live in the U. S. and are worried about John Poindexter reading your e-mails  :Wink: 

The ebuild is going rather slowly, since I am learning about sed, bash scipting, and CVS at the same time, but it will hopefully be done soon, at least hopefully before BINC 2.0

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## drtebi

Great to hear that you are working on an ebuild for this imap server.

So maybe the reason why bincimap appears slow to me is that the binaries are not stripped? I am not really familiar with "stripping", except, well, you know...   :Embarassed:  I have done it once before with Apache though, could you give me a hint on how I would strip those binaries please?

Thanks

Oh--by the way, I have bincimap working now with v-webmail (http:www.v-webmail.co.uk). This is a really nice webmail interface in PHP, it used to be commercial until a month ago, apparently the guy had to go to the army and now made the source freely available... 

This worked almost out of the box too, one important change I had to do is change this in the local.servers.php file:

```
fold = INBOX/
```

note the trailing slash...

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## Woland

Well, if you can't strip, you can't fsck---well, actually, you can---so we'd better get that straight.  (Sorry for hte bad UNIX pun, couldn't resist.)

Bincimap installs two binary files: 

/usr/bin/bincimapd

/usr/bin/bincimap-up

so just run strip -s [file] and you will have gotten rid of all symbols.  Be sure to get before and afeter sizes of the files, to see if this makes a difference.

Right now I am compiling binc1.8

Here is what stripping has done for me

```

kwaku@Eudaemon bincimap-1.1.8 $ ll src/bincimap{d,-up}

-rwxr-xr-x    1 kwaku    users        4.7M May 26 22:30 src/bincimap-up

-rwxr-xr-x    1 kwaku    users         12M May 26 22:30 src/bincimapd

kwaku@Eudaemon bincimap-1.1.8 $ ls -l  src/bincimap{d,-up}

-rwxr-xr-x    1 kwaku    users     4948040 May 26 22:30 src/bincimap-up

-rwkwaku@Eudaemon bincimap-1.1.8 $ strip -s  src/bincimap{d,-up}

kwaku@Eudaemon bincimap-1.1.8 $ ll src/bincimap{d,-up}

-rwxr-xr-x    1 kwaku    users        388K May 26 22:34 src/bincimap-up

-rwxr-xr-x    1 kwaku    users        816K May 26 22:34 src/bincimapd

kwaku@Eudaemon bincimap-1.1.8 $ ls -l  src/bincimap{d,-up}

-rwxr-xr-x    1 kwaku    users      397332 May 26 22:34 src/bincimap-up

-rwxr-xr-x    1 kwaku    users      835308 May 26 22:34 src/bincimapd

```

Quite a difference, eh?

See info strip or man strip for more fun.

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## drtebi

Hello again,

I stripped the binaries now too, it's quite easy actually, just wanted to make sure I don't do something wrong...

I got the same results in file size as you do.

However, I got courier-imap now working on my home server as well, and despite the fact that it is a lot bigger and a bit more complicated to install, it seems to work faster and "less Beta". With Bincimap my webmail interface had problems at times, and just wouldn't respond anymore. I am not sure what it was though.

By the way, have you seen my post at

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=56647

? I am getting quite frustrated, as I cannot get to work on my production server what's allready working fine on my (almost identical) home server. If you have any clue, please help...

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