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| Setting up your own IMAP server |
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| Friday, 27 November 2009 23:45 | |||||||||||||
Page 1 of 10 4207 This article describes how to set up your own IMAP server. Why not use those standard pop3 accounts we´re already using? Because once an e-mail is downloaded to a specific computer it is stored at this computer. When using different PCs at home or when you´re not at this specific computer you will not have access to this very e-mail. This sucks. So we´re not only setting up an IMAP server for your home usage, we will also install a secure webmail interface, a spam filter and an antivirus solution. When we´re done you will be able to connect via secure IMAP and HTTP to your mails from everywhere on earth and manage your mails directly on your own server. All this is done while keeping in mind a low consumption of energy of our server (you´ll see that later). This article is based on the tutorial by Gargi at this link, this article by Kevin Papst and the websites of getmail, procmail, Dovecot, Spamassassin, clamAV and RoundCube. A few words before we start: all bash commands, config file contents and similar are displayed in a syntax highlighting box like this one:
The commands might be line-wrapped. You can see the line wrap by either the line numbers or the green arrow
 . To copy this line you can either use the copy symbol  or display the text unformatted in a popup without any line wraps  .You also need to know how to handle the editor 'nano'. You save files by pressing CTRL+O (watch the grey line at the bottom), exit by pressing CTRL-X (again watch that line) and navigate by using your arrow keys. When creating a new file you want to edit I will first create the file with the command 'touch' and then edit it with 'nano'. That´s not necessary, by using 'nano' with an new file name it will be created when you save it. I will use getmail to fetch our mails from our various pop3 accounts, procmail to deliver the mails to different mailboxes and folders, dovecot as our IMAP server and RoundCube as webmailer. I will not set up an MTA like Exim to deliver our sent mails to our providers SMTP server. When using an e-mail client I will connect directly to the SMTP servers of the various providers, when using webmail I´ll let RoundCube handle the transfer using the built-in PHP-mailer. We will need a few prerequisits before we can start. We either need a static IP or a dynamic domain name. You can get one of those dynamic domain names at dyndns.org for instance. There are plenty of other services like that, just google around to find one that suits your needs. You will also need a router or some software tool that automatically reports your current IP to this dynDNS service provider. With this service you will reach your home network with a domain name no matter what your current IP might be. Example: you´re a customer of T-Online Germany. Your IP changes every 24 hrs. Nevertheless you still can reach your home network without knowing the current IP by its dynamic domain name (like for instance someguy.dyndns.org). You will also need a linux based PC. I´m referring to my home server with Debian 5 (Lenny).
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Thanks a lot for the beautiful document,i have completed ninety percentage iam
having some clarification how to create the imap user login and password.Iam
going to use for the internal process only so i had installed Dovecot its
working fine and enabled the protocols.so please guide how to give up the
username and passowrd.
Regards
SAMY