When you have more than a few Unix people together you will end up with vehement, and possibly violent, disagreement, over the Right Way To Do Things. This generally starts with Unix flavour, distribution (if relevant to Unix flavour), and then wends its way through the countrysides of editor wars, MUA disagreements, MTA squabbles, and, of course, mailspool layouts.
Once upon a time, I had a mail server used by people who would ssh into the server and use the MUA of choice, in text mode, as God intended. But then Complications arose. More people began to use it, people who did not like console MUAs. Further more, some of the users became trapped behind corporate firewalls who frowned[1] on tunneling ssh through said corporate firewalls.
So some way of providing access for GUI clients, webmail, and console clients, sometime sharing the same mail spool.
So uw-imap was installed, and it was, well, it only sucked a bit, and squirrelmail was installed, and it didn’t suck much. uw-imapd even supported SSL[2].
But time passed, and mailspools grew, and soon the users complained. Webmail was becoming unusable, unless you like spending minutes waiting for 20 mails to be rendered in a browser. uw-imap was starting to suck. A lot. It was time to find something that sucked less.
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