Tag Archive for 'ssl'

Last week I needed a local IMAP server on MacOS X Leopard (10.5) for temporary testing. After struggling with courier-imap for hours, I’ve finally settled on Dovecot. You’ll see below how easy it is to install and configure it.

We’re lucky, Dovecot is available in Mac Ports, so we can install it easily:

port install dovecot

It’s time to configure it. We start with the default configuration template:

cp /opt/local/etc/dovecot/dovecot-example.conf /opt/local/etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf

Then we can edit the dovecot.conf configuration file as we wish. FYI, here are my modifications:

--- /opt/local/etc/dovecot/dovecot-example.conf	2010-04-23 14:29:52.000000000 +0200
+++ /opt/local/etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf	2010-04-23 14:51:06.000000000 +0200
@@ -21,7 +21,7 @@

 # Protocols we want to be serving: imap imaps pop3 pop3s
 # If you only want to use dovecot-auth, you can set this to "none".
-#protocols = imap imaps
+protocols = imap

 # A space separated list of IP or host addresses where to listen in for
 # connections. "*" listens in all IPv4 interfaces. "[::]" listens in all IPv6
@@ -45,7 +45,7 @@
 # SSL/TLS is used (LOGINDISABLED capability). Note that if the remote IP
 # matches the local IP (ie. you're connecting from the same computer), the
 # connection is considered secure and plaintext authentication is allowed.
-#disable_plaintext_auth = yes
+disable_plaintext_auth = no

 # Should all IMAP and POP3 processes be killed when Dovecot master process
 # shuts down. Setting this to "no" means that Dovecot can be upgraded without
@@ -221,7 +221,7 @@
 #
 # <doc/wiki/MailLocation.txt>
 #
-#mail_location =
+mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir

 # If you need to set multiple mailbox locations or want to change default
 # namespace settings, you can do it by defining namespace sections.

Before starting Dovecot, we have to create a dummy SSL certificate:

mkdir -p /opt/local/etc/ssl/{certs,private}
openssl req -new -x509 -days 3650 -nodes -out /opt/local/etc/ssl/certs/dovecot.pem -keyout /opt/local/etc/ssl/private/dovecot.pem

And finally, we can launch the Dovecot server itself as root:

dovecot

That’s all !

You can now access your local IMAP server with any client. Here is an example with Thunderbird:

And if you have problems, the first reflex is to read dovecot’s logs:

tail -F /var/log/mail.log