This page is part of the EmailServer article.

Dovecot for POP3 and IMAP

Dovecot is a good and flexible POP3 and IMAP mail server. It is very performing and can manage large amounts of emails.
Docevot is part of Fedora Core 4 and we don't have to do too much to make it work, although setting encrypted communications takes a bit of work.

If you haven't got it on your system, you can build it from source or just use the ubiquitous yum:

First, we need to tell Dovecot where to fin our emails: as you remember, we told Postfix to use maildirs in the user directories instead of the default mbox.

Edit the /etc/dovecot.conf file and modify the following lines:

Restart Dovecot (service dovecot restart) and test it right away, trying to get email from your test administrator account through POP3 and IMAP. Note that you must have sent email to that account first so Postfix could create the proper directory structure, otherwise you'll get and error when trying to access the IMAP folder that doesn't exist yet.

SSL for IMAP and POP

In the older article for Fedora Core 4 we used stunnel to encrypt our seucred POP and IMAP channels. You can access that article on the SecureAccess page where we still use stunnel for securing email we send to the server..

To change a bit, we're going to follow Dovecot standard configuration and allow it to use SSL directly for POP3S and IMAPS.

First, remove the existing cert files, we're going to replace them later:

Then edit the /etc/pki/dovecot/dovecot-openssl.cnf to look suitatble for your organisation:

Now we need to correct the small script that the dovecot people have nicely provided to generate the key.
Edit /usr/share/doc/dovecot-1.0/examples/mkcert.sh and change the following line:

Now all we need is to run it.

That's it, you should now be able to connect to the server after configuring your client to use SSL.

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