wiki:howto/SetupDovecot

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How to setup Dovecot

  • Audience: Advanced E-Mail setup
  • Requires: MacPorts >=1.6, mail/dovecot, shells/zsh-devel

Introduction

Dovecot is a simple IMAP server which uses the standart maildir file format for storrage.

Installation

Install dovecot with

port install dovecot

Configuration

Note: Du not use any of the attached files without checking / changing them with you favourite text editor.

Step 1: create user

Dovecot will drop root privileges when they are not needed any more so you need to create an user and group for dovecot to run with. You can use the Make_Dovecot_Directories.command to do so.

Step 2: create directories

Dovecot need to directories to work with - one to store run status, one where the mail is stored. See howto/SetupPostfix on how to set up postfix to make incoming mail available to dovecot. You can use the Make_Dovecot_Directories.command to do so.

Step 3: create certificates

Dovecot supports encrypted connections and while in a local network it might not be necessary you will still need to create certificate files. You can use Make_Dovecot_Directories.command together with dovecot-openssl.cnf to create the certificates. Remember to change dovecot-openssl.cnf - there should be no "my_" left in the file and both files need to be in the same directory.

Step 4: set-up configuration

Next you need to set up dovecot.conf. You find the file in /opt/local/etc. As a starting point you can use dovecot.conf together with passwd.dovecot and userdb.dovecot. You will need to add all your mail user to the passwd.dovecot and userdb.dovecot.

The separate user and password files are needed since OSX does not use /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow.

Step 5: starting the server

Step 6: testing the server

Optional Parts

Instead of using separate user and password files you can try set-up LDAP.

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