How nginx can improve imap webaccess

Server NGINX
1

Hello

I looked for long information about how nginx can improve IMAP !
After hour I found this useful remark from Igor on this list:

You need nginx IMAP/POP3 proxy only if

  1. you have several IMAP/POP3 backends,
  2. you need the single enter point, say, mail.domain.com,
  3. and you have a LOT of IMAP/POP3 accounts (e.g. as
    fastmail.fm: http://blog.fastmail.fm/?p=592 )

I was expecting nginx was able to filter login/logout command
needed by “connection less” request from web client!
But it doesnt happend !

Then my question ! Can nginx improve IMAP web client accesses ?

I know IMAP protocol, and I don’t see myself how to could be easy to
cache
status or LIST result, this why I ask.

Regards

Alain Spineux

PS : Maybe the Igor’s remark should be somewhere in the wiki !

2

Hi,

On Mon, 2007-11-05 at 15:14 +0000, Alain Spineux wrote:

I was expecting nginx was able to filter login/logout command
needed by “connection less” request from web client!
But it doesnt happend !

Because it wasn’t designed to do that. It was designed to spread the
load of tons of IMAP clients to several upstream IMAP servers.

Then my question ! Can nginx improve IMAP web client accesses ?

I don’t think so, since nginx doesn’t support connection caching, and
webmail issue is that the connections from the web server to the imap
server are restarted on each web browser request.

I know IMAP protocol, and I don’t see myself how to could be easy to cache
status or LIST result, this why I ask.

I think you should have a look to UP-imapproxy:

http://www.imapproxy.org/ (which wasn’t responding this morning)

It has been designed to cache the connections from the web server to the
imap server.

Hope that helps,