Gmail's IMAP support roll-out this week had nerds all atwitter about the possibility of synchronized email access across devices, computers, and clients. IMAP is far superior to regular old POP for fetching your messages and maintaining your folder list whether you're on your iPhone, office or home computer. If IMAP's got you curious but you're not sure what desktop application to use with Gmail, consider the extensible, fast, cross-platform and free Mozilla Thunderbird, our beloved Firefox's little sibling. Here's how to get the full Gmail experience in Thunderbird with IMAP.
I initially wrote SirAdmin as a diagnostic tool, so that when users reported problems with certain mailboxes, my IT support staff who were not comfortable with the command line interface of cyradm could assign themselves an ACL to view such mailboxes in their own email client in order to quickly diagnose whether the reported problem was server-side or client-side.
In early 2006, Marshall University laid out a plan to migrate HOBBIT (Figure 1), an HP OpenVMS cluster handling university-wide e-mail services. Plagued with increasing spam attacks, this cluster experienced severe performance degradation. Although our employee e-mail store was moved to Microsoft Exchange in recent years, e-mail routing, mailing list and student e-mail store (including IMAP and POP3 services) were still served by OpenVMS with about 30,000 active users. HOBBIT's e-mail software, PMDF, provided a rather limited feature set while charging a high licensing fee. A major bottleneck was discovered on its external disk storage system: the dated storage technology resulted in a limited disk I/O throughput (40MB/second at maximal) in an e-mail system doing intensive I/O operations.