Wednesday, January 14, 2009

IndiMail Release 1.3

INTRODUCTION

IndiMail is a Scalable, Secure, Reliable, Efficient, and a highly
configurable Mailing Solution. IndiMail allows Users in a domain to be
distributed across multiple hosts (without NFS). IndiMail has multiple
queues to provide a high speed queuing. IndiMail uses a heavily modifed version of qmail.

IndiMail also provides programs to manage Virtual Domains and large number of users in Virtual Domains. These users can be distributed across multiple hosts. A high speed query lookup daemon (inlookup) allows IndiMail to handle large number of queries with MySQL as the RDBMS.

By default, IndiMail provides an authentication module for Courier IMAP called authindi. It also provides a Password Lookup Service using Name Service Swith (NSS). This allows any IMAP/POP3 server to work with IndiMail as long as the IMAP/POP3 server provides for authentication of users agains the system's /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow. The Password Lookup Service extends the system's getpwnam() family of functions to work with IndiMail's MySQL database without making any code changes to IMAP/POP3 server. Hence theoritically IndiMail can be used with almost any IMAP/POP3 server.

IndiMail has been undergoing several changes especially on simplification of Installation. After quite a few testing with some users of IndiMail, many of the Install issues have been sorted out. I am happy to release IndiMail Version 1.3 which fixes quite a few Installation issues. The file INSTALL has been overhauled.

IndiMail uses supervise (part of daemontools package) to startup and monitor all services. This allows IndiMail to achieve very high uptimes. IndiMail also uses envdir as part of its startup script. This allows all all configuration items to be easily configured by changing environment variables or simple text files called Control Files. A tool called svctool, with command-line options which helps you to configure any configuration item in IndiMail (creation of supervise scripts, qmail configuration, installation of all default MySQL tables, creation of default aliases, users, etc).

There are four Mailing Lists for IndiMail


  1. indimail-support - You can subscribe for Support at https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/indimail-support. You can email indimail-support@lists.sourceforge.net for posting messages to this list.
  2. indimail-devel - You can subscribe at https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/indimail-devel
  3. indimail-announce - This is only meant for announcement of New Releases or patches. You can subscribe at http://groups.google.com/group/indimail. You can email indimail-devel@lists.sourceforge.net for posting messages to this list.
  4. Archive at Google - http://groups.google.com/group/indimail. This group acts as a remote archive. Any discussions posted here goes to indimail-support.
There is also a Project Tracker for IndiMail (Bugs, Feature Requests, Patches, Support Requests) at
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=230686

Summary of Changes in 1.3

  1. Added dumpconfig command in svctool. To show all variables configured in supervise.
  2. Made Changes and Corrected typos in INSTALL.
  3. Fixed INSTALLATION issues. Modifed file INSTALL, Makefile.am, svctool.in, bootstrap
  4. Added function backfill to fill empty slots left (by deleting users) in dir_control
  5. Create queue_base control file when creating queues
  6. Added --sql-mode=NO_BACKSLASH_ESCAPES
  7. Added documentation for training bogofilter.
  8. Created wordlist.db from corpus at http://wwww.spamassassin.apache.org/publiccorpus/
  9. Create empty wordlist.db if wordlist.db does not exist
  10. Changed Makefile.am to fix dependencies of qmail on IndiMail
  11. Completed backfill code for dir_control
  12. Locking can now be specified in --enable-file-locking=y|n|s||l||f. Which allows one to use flock(), semaphores or links for providing locking operations.
  13. Fixed remove_line() removing all matched line. New option now to remove only the first matched line.

IndiMail Queue Mechanism

Indimail has the ability of configuring multiple local and remote queues. A queue is a location on your hard disk where email are deposited ...