IMAP
IMAP is a much improved mail delivery and organisation system. Dovecot is a modern and flexible IMAP server. The plan is to set up IMAP on OrganicDesign in order to have better control of our mail service, and as a service to offer clients by ensuring it's installation is included as part of Debian Post Install. Also, by having our mail folders centralised on our own server the data can be included in our weekly FS backups.
It should also be possible to directly authenticate mail users against the users table of a wiki.
- See: /etc/dovecot/dovecot-sql.conf
Current state
- logging at /var/log/dovecot.log
- mbox files at /var/mail/[first letter of username]/[username]
Authentication against MediaWiki
It would be nice to have the same password for the IMAP email account as is used with the wiki. To do this we use dovecot's ability to use a sql database to obtain user and password information.
MediaWiki uses hashed passwords. Here is a code fragment that show how this is done:
function wfEncryptPassword( $userid, $password ) {
global $wgPasswordSalt;
$p = md5( $password);
if($wgPasswordSalt)
return md5( "{$userid}-{$p}" );
else
return $p;
}
As you can see the global $wgPasswordSalt affects how the passwords are stored. On Organicdesign we have this option enabled.
Todo
- Need help setting up an MX record in DNS to be able to test mail delivery and collection.
- does this mean we need to set up Bind on the server, or should I just configure the webdrive DNS to point an MX record to our IP?
