I had this requirement for deploying an email system with IMAP. I already had a bit of experience with postfix and cyrus IMAP. But I wanted something different this time. So I started searching for a server which was capable of working with sendmail. Sendmail was already running on the server I was working on and I was not keen on installing another SMTP server from scratch (lazy me). The server OS was Red Hat Linux. After some research I came across Dovecot.
Sendmail is a general purpose internetwork email routing facility that supports many kinds of mail-transfer and -delivery methods, including the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) used for email transport over the Internet.
Dovecot is an open source IMAP and POP3 server for Linux/UNIX-like systems, written primarily with security in mind. Developed by Timo Sirainen, Dovecot was first released in July 2002. Dovecot primarily aims to be a lightweight, fast and easy to set up open source mailserver.
Dovecot can work with standard mbox, Maildir, and its own experimental native high-performance dbox formats. It is fully compatible with UW IMAP and Courier IMAP servers’ implementation of them, as well as mail clients accessing the mailboxes directly. Dovecot also includes a Mail delivery agent (called Local delivery agent in Dovecot’s documentation), with optional Sieve filtering support.
Ok now to the technical part
What do we need?
