Mail system

Cyrus

The Cyrus IMAP server differs from other IMAP server implementations in that it is generally intended to be run on sealed servers, where normal users are not permitted to log in. The mail spool uses a filesystem layout and format similar to the Maildir format used by other popular email servers such as qmail, Courier, Dovecot, etc. Cyrus IMAP's spool format is said to have improved performance and scalability to Maildir, and is stored in parts of the filesystem that are private to the Cyrus IMAP system. Users can access mail through the IMAP/IMAP-S, POP3/POP3-S or KPOP protocols.

The Cyrus IMAP server supports server-side mail filtering through the implementation of a mail filtering language called Sieve.

The private mailbox database design gives the server large advantages in efficiency, scalability, and administratability. Multiple concurrent read/write connections to the same mailbox are permitted. The server supports access control lists on mailboxes and storage quotas on mailbox hierarchies.

Installing

For debian and ubuntu we've fortunately got great packages. Note that debconf will ask for your fqdn, make sure to enter it correctly, that would cause problems in the future if not.

Also, take in account that cyrus-*2 is a regex passed to apt-get that will autocomplete with all packages matching itSo this will be a very large amount of packages that you can easily avoid by deciding wich ones you'll really use.

   apt-get install cyrus-*2 postfix

Actually that completes in:

   cyrus22-admin # Admin
   cyrus22-clients # Clients
   cyrus22-common # Common files
   cyrus22-dev # Dev headers
   cyrus22-doc # Docs
   cyrus22-imapd # Imap server
   cyrus22-murder # Proxies / aggregator
   cyrus22-nntpd # News server
   cyrus22-pop3d # Pop3 server

It's ok like that but for example, those packages can be not-installed:

   cyrus-dev-2.2
   cyrus-nntpd-2.2

And you probably don't want the clients and proxies/aggreagator:

   cyrus-clients-2.2 # (test clients)
   cyrus22-murder # (Proxies and aggregator)

If you decide to not use the regex you can install the following packages alone:

   cyrus-admin-2.2
   cyrus-common-2.2
   cyrus-doc-2.2
   cyrus22-nntpd
   cyrus22-pop3d

Testing

Configure cyrus as described in "Configuring cyrus", so now lets open cyrusadm with:

   cyradm --user cyrus --auth plain localhost

And create a mailbox for your user with

   mc user.foobar

With this you should be able to send and retrieve mails with a normal client.

Postfix

Postfix is a free and open source mail transfer agent (MTA), a computer program for the routing and delivery of email. It is intended as a fast, easy-to-administer, and secure alternative to the widely-used Sendmail MTA.

Postfix is the default MTA for a number of Unix(-like) operating systems such as Ubuntu.[1]

It is released under the IBM Public License 1.0 which is a free software licence.

Installing

To install just:

   apt-get install postfix

Once installed, you'll have to configure it, and be able to create new users. This is a big part of this docs, so it's splitted in "Configuring postfix"

Testing

If using pam:

   useradd test

If using db:

   You'd better use a gui for this. Really.
   You could insert users in the db manually but it's really painful, just install some
   gui for that purpose.

Now you should be able to send mails from your new user.

SASL

Installing

In order to use sasl auth method we'll need to install sasl:

 apt-get install sasl2-bin

Testing

To create new users execute:

echo pass |saslpasswd2 -c -p user

Initially we'll modify cyrus admin password (for the user we enabled before):

echo secret | saslpasswd2 -c -p cyrus

Funambol

Download funambol from : https://www.forge.funambol.org/DomainHome.html

Actually I've used: http://download.forge.objectweb.org/sync4j/funambol-8.0.1.bin It's rather big so better have a cofee now or start reading something (~130M)

   wget http://download.forge.objectweb.org/sync4j/funambol-8.0.1.bin
   chmod +x funambol-?.?.?.bin
   ./funambol-?.?.?.bin

Now we accept the license (a trick: press spacebar). And press enter when asks for place to install (/opt/ is ok)

Now, just launch funambol from

   /opt/Funambol/bin/funambol start

The next will open administration tool, where you'll need to create users also. You have to add a system user a mailbox for that user, and a user in funambol server before going further from here..

   /opt/Funambol/admin/bin/funamboladmin

Now you'll have to configure funambol wich is documented in "Configuring funambol"

Testing funambol

To test contacts sync and so we install syncevolution on our system:

   echo "deb http://downloads.syncevolution.org/apt stable main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/syncevolution &&\
   apt-get update && apt-get install syncevolution

If you're going to install the server in a different machine that the client you should download admin tool from here: https://www.forge.funambol.org/servlets/OCNDirector?id=V8FUNADMLIN

Actually, there isn't support for push mail ds on linux so we'll need an external device for testing it. A nokia or windows mobile device will do it.

However, IMAP does have currently idle mail capability, wich is rather similar to push mail.

Sources

Wikipedia (Cyrus)

Wikipedia (Postfix)