2009 Jul 19 - Sun

Debian Lenny with Sendmail, Dovecot, MailScanner, SpamAssassin: Part 5

A couple of articles ago, I started with a DoveCot Installation. I managed to download, build, and get a rough installation. I also prepared a userid for the service. It was at that point in the Dovecot installation instructions where they started talking about certificates, and I side-tracked into Certificate Authorities and certificate installation.

In /etc/dovecot, I copied dovecot-example.conf to dovecot.conf. In dovecot.conf, I updated the following lines to get things started:

protocols = imap imaps
disable_plaintext_auth = no
ssl = no
mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir
#mail_location = maildir:/%h/Maildir
auth_debug_passwords = yes

Dovecot Wiki does a good job of explaining the installation process. In fact, the non-ssl installation process is quite painless, and consists mostly of testing the connection.

Once the basic configuration is tested, then enable the configuration for ssl, and restart Dovecot.

disable_plaintext_auth = yes
ssl = yes
auth_debug_passwords = no
# Same keys from the sendmail installation
ssl_cert_file = /etc/ssl/private/mail.example.com.crt
ssl_key_file = /etc/ssl/private/mail.example.com.key

Startup an IMAP session with a Mail Client and try IMAP and IMAPS. Try sending email as well through the SMTP Sendmail connection with encryption. Tcpdump can be used to look at packets.

There is a Sample Dovecot init.d script which can be used to start, stop, and reload the service. The sample can be pasted verbatim into /etc/init.d/dovecot. Also do a 'chmod 755 /etc/init.d/dovecot'. Then '/etc/init.d/dovecot start'.

With a successful send and receive of email, that wraps up the rather lengthy configuration of a reasonably protected email solution encompassing Sendmail as an email transport mechanism, Dovecot as an IMAP/IMAPS service, and MailScanner with SpamAssassin/F-Prot for email scanning and protection.