Cyrus IMAP HOWTO
Cyrus IMAP HOWTO
Aurora Skarra-Gallagher (Community Vision)v1.3, 11 October 2000
A comprehensive guide to installing, configuring, and running Cyrus Imap and Cyrus
Sasl
(c) 2000 Aurora Skarra-Gallagher
This section was copied from the HOWTO-HOWTO:
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Comments (especially corrections) can be sent to
asg@CommunityVision.com
- v1.3: inetd.conf error fix, authentication information added, more troubleshooting info
- v1.2: SASL Config error fix, new postfix configuration, and database pruning (thanks, Jernej)
- v1.1: Fixed sendmail.mc configuration file error and added IMAP information to the introduction.
- Italics signifies a directory
This font signifies instructions to be ran at the command line
This definition is from the
ComputerUser.com High-Tech Dictionary:
Internet Message Access Protocol. A protocol that allows a user to perform certain electronic mail functions on a remote server rather than on a local computer. Through IMAP the user can create, delete, or rename mailboxes; get new messages; delete messages; and perform search functions on mail. A separate protocol is required for sending mail. Also called Internet Mail Access Protocol.
IMAP allows the user to read email from many different locations and accounts because email folders are stored on the server, locally, at the home or the office, for instance. Even saved and read messages are stored on the IMAP server. POP only stores new unread messages on the server, and the read and saved messages are stored locally. To force POP to not delete email once it has been read can create many copies of the same email, creating a waste of space and confusion. However, IMAP is usually more complicated to set up. If you only have one email account, POP is most likely your best choice. If you want to access more than one account, from different locations, IMAP will probably serve you most efficiently.
Cyrus has its own mailbox database which is standalone and increases performance, whereas Washington uses the stanard UNIX mailbox format, which was designed for a smaller set of users. Washington is portable to more UNIX and non-UNIX systems than Cyrus. The main difference is that with Cyrus, you don't have to add new users to your linux box (i.e. in /etc/passwd) to add new mail users, and with Washington, you do.
The homepage is currently located at:
http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/imapd
You will need both IMAP and SASL. Download the latest files here:
ftp://ftp.andrew.cmu.edu/pub/cyrus-mail Download cyrus-imapd-X.X.X.tar.gz and cyrus-sasl-X.X.X.tar.gz (where X.X.X is the latest release) into
your temporary directory.
I will use /temp as the directory I've uncompressed the files
under for the rest of the examples.
This is the default method of authentication. It stores usernames and passwords in the SASL secrets file sasldb. In this HOWTO, I assume you are using the sasldb method of authentication.
The following definition came from the OpenLDAP website. Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is an open-standard protocol for accessing information services. The protocol runs over Internet transport protocols, such as TCP, and can be used to access stand-alone directory servers or X.500 directories. This method isn't discussed in this HOWTO, but here is a link to a page with patches and info:
http://www.openldap.org/faq/data/cache/428.html
Not enough info to document. Email me if you have some.
Not enough info to document. Email me if you have some.
Here we untar and gunzip the file in a single step.
cd /temp tar -zxvf cyrus-sasl-X.X.X.tar.gz cd cyrus-sasl-X.X.X
For most purposes, the following set of instructions works fine. If you would like to examine the
other configuration options, type ./configure --help | more
./configure make make install
If you don't want your password check to be the default sasldb, you must specify
which one of PAM, kerberos_v4, passwd, shadow you wish to use. If PAM is the
authentication you desire for example, you would type:
./configure --with-pwcheck_method=PAM
instead of the ./configure line above
The following commands will tar and gunzip cyrus IMAP under /temp.
cd /temptar -zxvf tar/cyrus-imapd-1.6.24.tar.gzcd cyrus-imapd-1.6.24
When I tried to install cyrus IMAP, I got errors regarding the file com_err.h. My com_err.h was
located in /usr/include/et. It needs to reside in /usr/include.
Run the following command to make sure it is in the correct location:
locate com_err.h
This will show you where the file is. If it is under /usr/include,
you can skip to the next section. If it is in another directory, just copy it to
/usr/include. If it doesn't exist, download it here:
http://www.ludd.luth.se/~jnilsson/cvsweb/cvsweb.cgi/src/contrib/com_err.
./configure --with-auth=unix
Cyrus requires a user to own its files. The default user is cyrus. The following command adds a user
cyrus with the group of "mail"
useradd -g mail cyrus
You'll want to set the password for user cyrus.
passwd cyrus
Type in the password you desire cyrus to have each time you are prompted
make depend make all CFLAGS=-O make install
That's it! You're ready to configure Cyrus IMAP.
- Edit /etc/syslog.conf and add the following lines at the bottom:
local6.debug /var/adm/imapd.log
auth.debug /var/adm/auth.log
- Edit a new file /etc/imapd.conf and place in it the following lines:
configdirectory: /var/imap
partition-default: /var/spool/imap
admins: cyrus root
srvtab: /var/imap/srvtab
allowanonymouslogin: no
sasl_passwd_check: shadow
If you don't want your password check to be the default sasldb, you must specify
which one of PAM, kerberos_v4, passwd, shadow you wish to use. If PAM is the
authentication you desire for example, you would type:
sasl_passwd_check: pam
instead of the line above
This list of instructions will set up all the directories necessary for imap.
mkdir /var/admtouch /var/adm/imapd.log /var/adm/auth.logmkdir /var/imap /var/spool/imap /var/imap/srvtabchown cyrus /var/imap /var/spool/imap /var/imap/srvtabchgrp mail /var/imap /var/spool/imap /var/imap/srvtabchmod 750 /var/imap /var/spool/imap /var/imap/srvtabsu cyrus
You are now the user cyrus. This is necessary for the files to have the correct owner and group.
Continue:
tools/mkimapcd /var/imapchattr +S . user quota user/* quota/*chattr +S /var/spool/imapexit
You are now root again. The last command:
chattr +S /var/spool/mqueue
- Edit /etc/services and check for the following lines. If they do not exist, add them:
pop3 110/tcp
imap 143/tcp
imsp 406/tcp
kpop 1109/tcp
sieve 2000/tcp
- Edit /etc/inetd.conf and comment out any imap and pop3 lines and add the following:
imap stream tcp nowait cyrus /usr/cyrus/bin/imapd imapd
pop3 stream tcp nowait cyrus /usr/cyrus/bin/pop3d pop3d
- Edit /etc/sendmail.mc with care not to add extra spaces and add the following lines(do not copy and paste directly from this text as the tabs won't be added correctly):
MAILER(local)
MAILER(cyrus)
define(`confLOCAL_MAILER',`cyrus')
LOCAL_RULE_0
R$=N $: $#local $: $1
R$=N < @ $=w . > $: $#local $: $1
Rbb + $+ < @ $=w . > $#cyrusbb $: $1
Use tabs to separate the data (i.e. R$=N has three tabs between it and $: $#local $: $1)
Then run:
m4 sendmail.mc > sendmail.cf
- Edit /etc/group and add the user daemon to the mail group.
Postfix is a mail-deliver alternative to sendmail. Most linux installations use sendmail by default. If you use postfix, ignore configuration #3 from the last section and uncomment or add the following line in /etc/postfix/master.cf
cyrus unix - n n - - pipe flags=R user=cyrus argv=/usr/sbin/cyrdeliver -e -m ${extension} ${user}
Also add or uncomment this line in /etc/postfix/main.cf
local_transport = cyrus
Run the following command to set up a user for cyrus
/usr/local/sbin/saslpasswd cyrus
killall -HUP inetdsu cyrusimtest -m login -p imap localhost
Enter your password. If you see something like:
(L01 OK User logged in means you're in)
Then the setup has been successful. Type
. logout
to log out.
Still as the user cyrus, type the following commands. They will set up the
mailbox(es) for each user. Fill in the username where you see the (username).
cyradm localhostcm user.joebob (for all the user joebob)quitexit (back as root)
Now as root, enter a password for each username
saslpasswd (username)
If you don't periodically prune the database of deliveries, you can fill up your file system. Adding a cron job which will run once a day is one way to do this. That involves going to /etc/cron.daily and creating a file named cyrus-imapd. Inside that file, put the following two lines of code:
#!/bin/bash
su cyrus -s /bin/bash -c '/usr/cyrus/bin/deliver -E 3'
Make this script executable by running: chmod 755 cyrus-imapd
You should also create the deliverdb directory to store database files in:
mkdir /var/imap/deliverdb
Reboot the machine to make sure that everything has been restarted under the new
configuration
If you encounter any errors, you can do the following to view error messages:
tail /var/log/messagestail /var/adm/imapd.logkillall sendmail && sendmail -bd -X /root/error.log (then read
/root/error.log)
If you are having "virtual memory exhausted errors" when compiling, running
ulimit -d unlimited
as root has been reported to work.
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