E-Mail

The protocols we require for e-mail are the historic Internet standards that the world uses:

Transport of mail must be via Simple Mail Transport Protocol [RFC821]

Mailboxes must be accessed over the network via Internet Message Access Protocol - Version 4 (IMAP4) [RFC1730]

Mailboxes must be stored in UNIX Mail format and be accessible from a UNIX platform

To meet these requirements, our supported client is Netscape Mail, which access mailboxes via IMAP4, on PC or UNIX. Some UNIX-oriented users use elm, mh, mutt, or even /usr/ucb/mail. Our servers are Sun Solaris 2.6 machines running Sendmail 8.8.8 [Allman] as an Mail Transport Agent (MTA) and procmail [Berg] as a Mail Delivery Agent (MDA). IMAP4 protocol is supplied by Sun's SIMS 2.1 IMAP4 Server product. We are evaluating the University of Washington IMAP4 server and may switch to it in the future. Because both IMAP4 servers store mailboxes in UNIX Mail format, we can change servers with little effort.

We selected Solaris over NT because UNIX scales better, is faster, can be made more secure, and it is easier to debug problems [Standish] [Kirch] [Petreley]. Sendmail is one of the few MTAs that we know of that is flexible enough to handle our complicated configuration requirements. Our alias management system is complicated due to our large size (we import alias information from many sources to build our alias database). We have a fine, robust mail system via our UNIX servers. Why reinvent the wheel when we can give NT users access to our current wheel? Open protocols permit us to do just that.