imap

This document describes how to install the Dovecot mail server from source as an imap / pop3 mail server for your domain and how to set up the sieve plugin so your clients can use the sieve mail filtering language for their mail accounts.

One of the challenges you may face when converting an office from Microsoft Windows to Linux is that many people archive their emails in PST files. There are PST tools available, but most of them are commercial, since the PST file format is closed and protected by Microsoft. There are several non-commercial methods to achieve roughly the same goal, and in this tutorial we use IMAP (more specifically, courier-imap) to convert all our emails from PST to the Maildir format.

Fetchmail is a program for retrieving emails from remote servers. Imagine you have five email accounts on five different servers. Of course, you do not want to connect to each of them to get your emails. This is where fetchmail comes into play. If you have a user account on a Linux server, you can make fetchmail download emails from remote servers and put them into just one mailbox (the one of your Linux user), from where you can retrieve them with your email client (e.g. Thunderbird or Outlook).

This tutorial shows how to set up a Debian Etch (Debian 4.0) based server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Courier POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. This tutorial is written for the 32-bit version of Debian Etch, but should apply to the 64-bit version with very little modifications as well.