[Dovecot] Disable IMAP for certain users, but not Webmailer

[Don Russell]

FORMER 03 | Baltasar Cevc wrote:
> Hi Russel,
>
> On Sun, 05 Aug 2007 08:28:12 -0700
> Don Russell <russell.don at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>   
>> 1 - storage is cheap - Costco sells a 1 TByte external drive for
>> approx $US 300. That holds a LOT of e-mail. The 500 GByte is less
>> than half that price.
>>     
> The problem is not storage as such. It's reliability of storage. For
> a good server, you need a hardware raid + backup, the latter being
> the real problem (mostly the time to make the backup, 1 TB would need
> quite some hours ;-)
>   

Presumably you would not accumulate 1 TByte of data before your first 
backup.... using incremental back up would alleviate the time problem.

So what I'm hearing is you will back up the mail on the server, but the 
mail retrieved by POP3 is the user's responsibility... i.e. it won't get 
backed up.

So you want to restrict IMAP use to only those users who need their mail 
backed up.  ;-)

Not sure what your situation is, but in the USA laws are underway for 
requiring corporations to keep ALL e-mail ... not sure what the state of 
those laws are.... maybe they won't materialize.... but obviously people 
are thinking along those lines...

Based on your e-mail address, I assume you are not subject to US laws 
etc... but I think it's a "sign" of things to come in the corporate world.

Anyway, I've taken this a bit off track... I do not know exactly how to 
implement what you asked for.... POP3 for some, IMAP for others. :-(

Off the top of my head.... since both of those protocols need 
authentication.... it ought to be possible to define credentials on a 
per-user basis so IMAP is successful only for some users. I would 
research IMAP authentication methods... you want the password file 
(database, whatever) to contain only a subset of the system users.... 
shouldn't be too difficult, just a bit of "double entry" when adding new 
users to te system.