[Dovecot] Setting up a local shared mailbox

Bob Hall rjhjr at cox.net
Fri Sep 12 21:42:25 EEST 2003


On Fri, Sep 12, 2003 at 11:54:56AM -0500, Peter Clark wrote:
> auth_passdb = pam
> auth_user = root

I thought you didn't need to be root to authenticate with PAM? If you 
can do this as dovecot-auth, it will be more secure.
> 
> 	Almost everything works fine, although I'm concerned about 'imap_listen = *'. 
> Is there any way to restrict this to just localhost? I tried 'imap_listen = 
> localhost', but that didn't seem to work. (Ditto with 127.0.0.1). (The other 

If you set it to localhost, then you can only access mail from the one 
machine. I was under the impression that you were trying to access mail 
from more than one machine on your LAN. If not, then I'm not sure what 
IMAP is doing for you.

I haven't tried setting it to the loopback interface. I did set it to the 
LAN interface, but that eliminated loopback. Since I want both, I set it 
back to *. That means that it's also listening on the Internet interface, 
but the firewall and permissions are both blocking any connections there, 
so we're probably pretty secure. 

Regarding the cheatsheet: I got the idea from McKusick's site at
www.mostgraveconcern.com. It seems to be a good way of packing the 
maximum info into the minimum space. Sort of like an extra-terse man 
page. A series of cheatsheets for specific implementations might be 
the fastest, easiest way of supplementing the existing documentation. 
Since it consists only of the config files without comments, perhaps 
other people could edit their files and contribute them? Particularly 
for unusual setups? 

Also, if you find a solution to a specific problem, please consider 
adding it to the troubleshooting guide on the Wiki. 

Bob Hall


More information about the dovecot mailing list