Dovecot

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Contents 1 Dovecot Summary 2 Dovecot Authentication 3 Dovecot AUTH Mechanisms 3.1 Chroot 4 Really Awesome Dovecot Features / Plugins 5 See Also 6 Links

Dovecot Summary

Dovecot is a POP3 and IMAP server, similar to Courier. It supports both mbox and maildir storage formats. I've never used it, but I've heard good things.

I'm interested in trying it out as LDA in conjunction with Postfix, as well as a SASL authentication system for Postfix.

Dovecot Authentication

Dovecot supports a bewildering amount of authentication storage systems, for example:

• MySQL
• PAM
• Dovecot LDAP
• Vpopmail

I'm trying it out as an IMAP based authentication system for Postfix SASL:

auth default {
  mechanisms = plain
  passdb passwd-file {
    args = username_format=%u /etc/dovecot/imap.passwd
  }
  userdb prefetch {
  }
}

Since I'm only authenticating the user and not accessing a Maildir or anything, I use the prefetch userdb option.

Dovecot AUTH Mechanisms

Looks like either LOGIN or CRAM-MD5 / HMAC-MD5 are good to use.

• http://wiki.dovecot.org/HowTo/CRAM-MD5

By storing a password in the CRAM-MD5 scheme for Dovecot, either PLAIN or CRAM-MD5 authentication mechanisms will work.

Chroot

addgroup --system dovecotauth
adduser --system --no-create-home --shel /bin/false --ingroup dovecotauth --disabled-password --disabled-login dovecotauth

Really Awesome Dovecot Features / Plugins

• Dovecot Post Login Scripting
• Dovecot Proxying
• Dovecot Antispam

See Also

• IMAP
• Postfix
• Courier
• GMail
• My Email Services Configurations
• Converting from Courier IMAP to Dovecot IMAP

Links

• http://www.dovecot.org/
• http://www.lxtreme.nl/index.pl/docs/linux/dovecot_postfix_pam
• http://wiki.dovecot.org/LDA