Configuring an IMAP Server


IMAP server installation and configuration works much like that for POP servers. As noted earlier, UW IMAP ships with most Linux distributions, and some distributions include other servers as well. Configuration is usually a matter of installing the package, checking or making a small change to a super server configuration, and restarting the super server.

IMAP Servers for Linux

Many of the packages described in the earlier section, "POP Servers for Linux," include IMAP functionality. Specifically, UW IMAP, Cyrus IMAP, and Courier all support IMAP as well as POP. In 2002, searches on http://www. sourceforge .net and Web search engines reveal several other IMAP server projects, but many of them are very new and have no working code available, or they fill rather esoteric niches , like a proxy server to allow Web browsing via IMAP.

UW IMAP, the most popular IMAP server for Linux, stores most mail folders as files in mbox format in the Linux user 's home directory. This may be undesirable if users have regular login accounts on the computer, because users might not recognize the purpose of the files and so might delete or move them. (You can change the default location of the mbox files by editing the source code and recompiling, as described in the CONFIG file that comes with the program's documentation.) Cyrus IMAP, on the other hand, uses its own proprietary format for everything but the mbox-format incoming mail folder. Courier IMAP uses the maildir format, which qmail uses by default and that is available as an option in Postfix and Exim, among others.

IMAP Server Installation and Configuration

Most distributions ship with UW IMAP in a package called imap or something similar. You can install this package and configure the IMAP server to run using your super server, as described in Chapter 4. Once it's running, UW IMAP uses your normal login database to authenticate users, so any user with a regular account and an active password can read e-mail using IMAP. As with POP configuration, there's no separate configuration file for IMAP options; just run it from your super server, and it should work.



Advanced Linux Networking
Advanced Linux Networking
ISBN: 0201774232
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 203

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