Changed IMAP server and happy with it

An old proverb states that all software from the University of Washington sucks. This is definitely true for software like pine, and it also turned out to be true for uw-imapd, the IMAP server that I used until yesterday.



Actually, the only reason I was using uw-imapd before was because I had a lot of mbox files before I switched from local mail fetching to my own IMAP server, and it was the least pain to switch over to IMAP using uw-imapd. But mysteriously, uw-imapd got a lot slower during the last year, and so I started observing uw-imapd closer. What was clear before was that using mbox as mailbox file format would be extremely inefficient. But when I attached strace to the imapd process, the whole thing looked even more horrible: while the client is total idle, imapd appears to have some kind of background noise of a lot of system calls, mostly alarm(). So it seems that uw-imapd does some kind of polling, instead of working in a event-based fashion using select() or poll(). This definitely sucks. So, I switched over to courier-imapd, which is nice to handle, uses Maildir mailboxes, which are much nicer (random access to mails in a mailbox, 1:1 mapping of operations on a mail to filesystem operations, faster backups when using rsync, ...), it reacts and loads mailboxes a lot faster than uw-imapd, and most importantly, it keeps the load a lot lower. What I pity that I virtually tortured myself for over a year with this crappy uw-imapd.