            Courier-IMAP - logo by Bas Boudrie <bboudrie@hetnet.nl>

   Copyright 1999-2006, Double Precision, Inc. This software is distributed
   under the terms of the GNU General Public License. See COPYING for
   additional information.

   Courier-IMAP is a fast, scalable, enterprise IMAP server that uses
   Maildirs. Many E-mail service providers use Courier-IMAP to easy handle
   hundreds of thousands of mail accounts. With the built-in IMAP and POP3
   aggregation proxy in Courier-IMAP 4.0, the only practical limit to
   Courier's horizontal scalability is available LAN bandwidth. In proxy
   mode, a pool of Courier servers receive IMAP and POP3 connections from
   clients, wait for the clients to send a login request, look up the mail
   account's server, and establish a proxy connection to the actual server
   that hosts the mail account.

   Please note that this IMAP server does NOT handle traditional mailbox
   files (/var/spool/mail, and derivatives), it was written and optimized for
   the specific purpose of providing IMAP access to Maildirs.

   "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.
   Maildir 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.

   This is the same IMAP server that's included in the Courier mail server,
   but configured as a standalone IMAP server that can be used with other
   mail servers - such as Qmail, Exim, or Postfix - that deliver to maildirs.
   A Courier/Postfix combination is very popular. If you already have Courier
   installed, you do not need to download this version. If you install this
   version, you must remove it if you later install the entire Courier
   server. It's possible to have both versions installed, but this will
   require a delicate juggling act that you'll have to learn on your own.

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     Insight Connector for Courier-IMAP is a commercial plugin for Microsoft
     Outlook(TM) that allows native Outlook groupware capabilities using
     Courier-IMAP. Outlook users can perform tasks typically available only
     when using the Exchange server, including folder sharing. Some of the
     features include folder sharing, public folders sharing,
     appointments/tasks scheduling, real-time data management, calendar
     sharing and other collaborative tasks.

     A trial version of Connector can be downloaded from
     http://courier.bynari.net. This software is supported by Bynari.

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   Courier-IMAP implements several 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.

References

   Visible links
   . http://www.courier-mta.org/imap/
   . http://www.qmail.org/man/man5/maildir.html
   . http://www.exim.org/
   . http://www.postfix.org/
   . http://www.courier-mta.org/mbox-vs-maildir/
   . http://www.courier-mta.org/
   . http://courier.bynari.net/
   . http://courier.bynari.net/
   . http://www.courier-mta.org/sqwebmail/
   . http://www.courier-mta.org/maildrop/
