Mail Part 3 Setup Imap Dovecot

A mail server where your mail program can't receive your mails is a bit lame. So this last post describes how you can setup a dovecot to serve your mails over imap.

The fist step as usual is to install it.

pkg install dovecot2
echo 'dovecot_enable="YES"' >> /etc/rc.conf

I personally use a really simple IMAP configuration if you need more, lets say something like pop3 support, you should definitely check out the dovecot documentation because dovecot can almost everything.

But for a simple IMAP server it's just these few lines in your config (/usr/local/etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf).

protocols = imap
ssl = required
ssl_key = </usr/local/openssl/private/mail.domain.tdl.key
ssl_cert = </usr/local/openssl/certs/mail.domain.tdl.crt
mail_location = maildir:~/mbox
listen = *

userdb {
  driver = passwd
  args = blocking=no
}

passdb {
  driver = pam
  args = 
}

Hint: I use here the same ssl certificat and key as for the OpenSMTPD config.

With the configuration file in place we can start (service dovecot start) and test the service. For testing I used openssl, like this:

openssl s_client -connect mail.domain.tdl:993

It should print a lot of informations about your certificate and you should be able to login with:

a1 LOGIN yourunixusername yourunixpasswordincleartext

Which should return something like this:

a1 OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 LITERAL+ ... LIST-STATUS BINARY MOVE] Logged in

This is the last part of a three part series:

• Setup smtp
• Setup dkim
• Setup imap {you are here}
• wrap-up