Introduction to Dovecot
Dovecot is an Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) and Post Office Protocol (POP) server, written primarily with security in mind. Dovecot aims to be lightweight, fast and easy to set up as well as highly configurable and easily extensible with plugins.
Note
Development versions of BLFS may not build or run some packages properly if LFS or dependencies have been updated since the most recent stable versions of the books.
Package Information
Additional Downloads
Dovecot Dependencies
Required
libtirpc-1.3.4
Optional
CLucene-2.3.3.4, ICU-74.1, libcap-2.69 with PAM, Linux-PAM-1.6.0, Lua-5.4.6, MariaDB-10.11.6 or MySQL, OpenLDAP-2.6.6, PostgreSQL-16.1, SQLite-3.45.0, Valgrind-3.22.0, xfsprogs-6.5.0, Cassandra, lz4, stemmer and libsodium
Installation of Dovecot
There should be dedicated users and groups for unprivileged Dovecot processes and for processing users' logins. Issue the following commands as the root
user:
groupadd -g 42 dovecot &&
useradd -c "Dovecot unprivileged user" -d /dev/null -u 42 \
-g dovecot -s /bin/false dovecot &&
groupadd -g 43 dovenull &&
useradd -c "Dovecot login user" -d /dev/null -u 43 \
-g dovenull -s /bin/false dovenull
First, apply a patch to fix problems with OpenSSL-3:
patch -Np1 -i ../dovecot-2.3.21-openssl3_fixes-1.patch
Next, apply a patch to fix a security vulnerability:
patch -Np1 -i ../dovecot-2.3.21-security_fix-1.patch
Install Dovecot by running the following commands:
CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/include/tirpc" \
LDFLAGS+=" -ltirpc" \
./configure --prefix=/usr \
--sysconfdir=/etc \
--localstatedir=/var \
--with-systemd=no \
--docdir=/usr/share/doc/dovecot-2.3.21 \
--disable-static &&
make
To test the results, issue make -k check.
Now, as the root
user:
make install
Command Explanations
CPPFLAGS=... LDFLAGS+=...: build with libtirpc instead of the recently removed RPC code provided by GlibC.
--disable-static
: This switch prevents installation of static versions of the libraries.
--with-ldap
: This switch enables OpenLDAP authentication support.
--with-pgsql
: This switch enables PostgreSQL database support.
--with-mysql
: This switch enables MySQL database support.
--with-sqlite
: This switch enables SQLite database support.
--with-lucene
: This switch enables CLucene full text search support.
--with-lua
: This switch enables Lua plugin support. This includes a mail and push notification plugin.
Configuring Dovecot
Config Files
/etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf
, /etc/dovecot/conf.d/*
, and /etc/dovecot/local.conf
Configuration Information
Copy an example configuration, which you can use as a starting point:
cp -rv /usr/share/doc/dovecot-2.3.21/example-config/* /etc/dovecot
The following configuration is a simple proof of concept with IMAP service using local users for authentication and mailbox location. Reading files from the conf.d
directory is commented out since the included example configuration requires OpenSSL and Linux PAM.
sed -i '/^\!include / s/^/#/' /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf &&
chmod -v 1777 /var/mail &&
cat > /etc/dovecot/local.conf << "EOF"
protocols = imap
ssl = no
# The next line is only needed if you have no IPv6 network interfaces
listen = *
mail_location = mbox:~/Mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u
userdb {
driver = passwd
}
passdb {
driver = shadow
}
EOF
You will definitely want to read the official documentation at https://wiki2.dovecot.org/ if you plan to use Dovecot in a production environment.
Boot Script
If you want the Dovecot server to start automatically when the system is booted, install the /etc/rc.d/init.d/dovecot
init script included in the blfs-bootscripts-20231119 package.
make install-dovecot
Contents
Installed Programs: doveadm, doveconf, dovecot, dovecot-sysreport, and dsync (symbolic link)
Installed Libraries: various internal plugins in /usr/lib/dovecot
Installed Directories: /etc/dovecot, /usr/{include,lib,libexec,share}/dovecot and /usr/share/doc/dovecot-2.3.21
Short Descriptions
doveadm
|
is the Dovecot administration tool
|
doveconf
|
is Dovecot's configuration dumping utility
|
dovecot
|
is the IMAP and POP server
|
dovecot-sysreport
|
prints system information that is useful to the Dovecot developers when submitting bug reports upstream
|
dsync
|
is Dovecot's mailbox synchronization utility
|