Courier IMAP

Courier is an IMAP server that uses Maildir mailboxes.

This isn't meant for production use yet, and should be moved to the new development server once it's up and running.

Currently, we're using Courier's userdb authentication system. If we offered this service to users, we'd probably want to use LDAP for authentication instead. This should also be done over SSL, but we don't have a certificate yet. There's documentation on setting those things up at http://buffy.riseup.net. We'd also want to set it up to handle virtual domains (see man makeuserdb).

sudo apt-get install courier-imap

In /etc/courier/authdaemonrc:

authmodulelist="authuserdb"

Adding a user

First, create a Unix user account as described in StandardUsersGroups. Let's suppose the username is sanja, the UID is 1004 and the GID is 1004 (you can get these from /etc/passwd). Type:

sudo userdb sanja set home=/home/sanja shell=/bin/bash mail=/home/sanja/Maildir uid=1004 gid=1004

Have the user come over to the console so they can enter their IMAP password. Become root (it's confusing to use sudo for this), and type:

userdbpw -md5 | userdb sanja set imappw

Then have them enter their password. Log out of the root shell, and type:

sudo makeuserdb

The user should now be able to use mail.socialtools.net as their IMAP server.
to top