What the f*&k is wrong with cyrus-imapd?
Maybe this should have been titled what the hell was the Fedora team thinking?
As you may or may not know, I was planning on upgrading this server from a puny IBM Aptiva 166 to a newer white box Celeron 400. I installed Fedora Core 3 on it. The whole “slim” 595mb of it. And then installed sendmail, apache, all the php stuff, mysql, spamassassin, clamav-milter, etc. Then came the part that is driving me nuts. I had to install an imap server- you know so that I can check my email.
I don’t know who decided that the cyrus-imapd package was “better” than UW-Imap. Whoever it was didn’t ask me about it. I resisted moving to cyrus-imapd when I slowly brought the old Aptiva up to almost a modern install. I fought with logins and authentications and then forced UW-Imap on it and all was good. I could get my email and so could the rest of my family and my business partners.
Now that I replaced that machine with a newer one, I was forced to use cyrus-imap, which in my opinion is a worthless piece of junk. It is infinitely more complex than UW-Imap, the configuration is completely different and, let’s face it; it’s broken. I can log in to check my email, but there is nothing delivered to the mail spool- which you have to setup with a stupid admin shell. You don’t have to be an admin like root, you have to log in as the user cyrus type in cyradm <hostname> and then create a spool for every user on the system. And it still doesn’t properly deliver mail to the spool… sure someone will tell me how easy it is, but give me a break. I can type the command mail and see that I have over 600 messages (that’s over 600 unread/new) but this stupid assed configuration gives me 0. A goose egg. Big fat nada, nothing.
At this point I would like to introduce a couple of few new words to the English language. Mufugger and mufugging.
Yeah, like “take that mufugger!!!!” when something works despite the developers’ obfuscation of the documents. However, I chatted with a friend of mine he recommended dovecot. Oh yeah! Much easier than installing that convoluted steaming pile of monkey dung that is cyrus-imapd.
Yeah dovecot beats cyrus-imapd hands down. The configuration took about 20 minutes considering I removed some packages I shouldn’t have. I had already put in about 20 hours on cyrus-imapd and hadn’t converted the inboxes to the funky assed cyrus-imapd format.
