Bruce's Blog

Mail: I've set up Postfix with SMTP authentication, spam filtering using SpamAssassin, virus scanning using Clam Antivirus and MailScanner and other niceties on my personal server. I've also set up Dovecot as the IMAP server with Maildir storage and I'm using Procmail to filter incoming mail into the appropriate folders. SquirrelMail is installed and configured for web based mail access and, of course, Apache is set up to host this page.

Server: This and more yummy stuff is all running on an Fedora Core 1 UML Virtual Machine image. All I need to do now is set up BIND and find a tool to generate handy image galleries without needing server side scripts that I have to keep track of lest I be left running some old exploitable version.

Dovecot: Before yesterday I had never heard of the Dovecot IMAP server. Dovecot looks like a new feature of Fedora/Red Hat as of Fedora Core 1. I had always disliked how Red Hat had only shipped wu-imap, a fundamentally useless and insecure server, as its only IMAP server. That looks like it will be fixed in the next version of its Enterprise product line if Fedora Core 1 is any indication.

At first glance Dovecot is a decent IMAP and POP3 server that is dead simple to configure and looks well written as far as security goes. The software seems to follow the principles of privilege seperation (ala OpenSSH) and seems to chroot itself whenever it can. The "seperate what needs to be done into logically seperate processes with the absolute minimum of privileges needed" approach used by postfix seems to be followed by Dovecot and it seems to make a nice complement to it. And did I mention it was dead simple to configure? Only one very heavily commented configuration file to deal with.

The experience reminds me I need to pick up a book on SASL as I keep tripping on it every time I go to touch SMTP and IMAP servers.

Useful resources:

• http://postfix.state-of-mind.de/patrick.koetter/smtpauth/index.html
• http://www.projektfarm.com/en/support/howto/postfix_smtp_auth_tls.html