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At my class project I'm asked to install and configure a mail service, to do that I have to :

  • Install and configure postfix
  • Install and configure Procmail
  • Configure postfix authentification with SASL
  • Integrate OpenLDAP to postfix

But actually I'm at the MDA step, I have to install ProcMail but should I also install Dovecot ? (Dovecot is not mentioned in the scope statement.

Correct me if I'm wrong, dovecot uses (pop3/imap) protocol, what about Procmail ? is it trivial for end users to configure their mail clients if I'm using Procmail ?

What are the differences between both of them ?

Thank you

rednaks
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3 Answers3

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Not sure if you really can compare procmail and dovecot, given that procmail only does local file delivery.

On the other hand, if you do install Dovecot the much more interesting choice is whatever you are doing to use procmail or sieve to sort incoming mail into folders etc. Generally I'd go with sieve myself, if nothing else because procmail is rather unmaintained, and haven't seen an upgrade since 2001.

Not that any of this necessarily matter, in case the task explicitly says to go with procmail.

andol
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As Andol says, they do different jobs.

Procmail sits in between the MTA and the POP/IMAP server (or MUA).

Dovecot is a nice scalable IMAP server.

With the former installed, then you'll be able to access your email using a client running on the server (such as mail, mailx, mutt) but not remotely. If you have a requirement to implement POP or IMAP, most Linux distros bundle the Univ of Washington imapd - if you've got acces to a packaged version then it will automaticaly integrate with pam for authentication and the mbox storage - i.e. it's really easy to set up. If you've got to roll your own from source code, then its probabably not any harder to use Dovecot. But if its not a requirement to provide pop and imap, then you don't need them.

symcbean
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End users who log in locally will be able to read their email locally. If you want to enable remote users to access their mailboxes with POP3 or IMAP, then you need a separate server such as Dovecot to enable that. But as it is not included in your task, you should probably assume an old-school installation where your users have access to the local disk either by using a terminal to log in and reading their email in mutt or similar, or by mounting or otherwise accessing the disk using NFS or some SSH wrapper (sshfs?)

tripleee
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