dovecot is a pop3 and imap server. it is of course open source. it goes on top of your mail transport agent (MTA) such as sendmail or postfix. as with all things difficult, it is only difficult if you do not know it.
funny thing is, i took it in my RHCE class and i still have my notes and ..they didnt work. so i had to do some research and this is the result
we will start with installing dovecot
yum -y install dovecot
next we will create the certs:
make -C /etc/pki/tls/certs dovecot.pem
answer the questions as you deem appropriate of course. next is to enable the imap and pop3 protocols support
sed -i 's/#protocols/protocols/g' /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf
add the certs to dovecot.conf. the last line tells dovecot which permissions to use to access the mail box directory
cat >> /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf << EOF
ssl_cert = </etc/pki/dovecot/certs/dovecot.pem
ssl_key = </etc/pki/dovecot/private/dovecot.pem
mail_access_groups = mail
EOF
after that disable plaintext authentication
sed -i 's/#disable_plaintext_auth/disable_plaintext_auth/g' /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-auth.conf
and to add the login mechanism to dovecot
sed -i 's/= plain/= plain login/g' /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-auth.conf
next set the correct permissions
sed -i 's/unix_listener auth-userdb {/unix_listener auth-userdb {\n\tmode = 0600, user = postfix, group = postfix/g' /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-master.conf
finally, we should tell dovecot where to find the mail files
sed -i 's,#mail_location =,mail_location = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u,g' /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf
system wise, we should also have it start automatically with the system
chkconfig dovecot on
and finally start the dovecot service
service dovecot restart
and thats it. dovecot is configured and you have both imap and pop3 services working now. the final step is verify
mutt -f pop://user@localhost mutt -f pop3s://user@domain.tld
if you need to trouble shoot, the dovecot logs to /var/log/maillog
Comments
double check to ensure you
double check to ensure you have disabled other ssl lines