Karen Almog writes:
I've just finishing working according to this howto -<URL:http://flurdy.com/docs/postfix/>http://flurdy.com/docs/postfix/ to set up a postfix/courier mail server.I only found the problem once everything was done, and i noticed that there wasn't any place in the tutorial that reffered to the actual creating of the mailboxes themselves. I understood later, after reading a bit, that courier is supposed to be able to create the inbox itself?
No, that would be your job, as the system administrator.An IMAP server provides access to mail in existing mailboxes. How those mailboxes are created in the first place, and how mail gets there, is not something the IMAP server cares about.
I'm very new at this, as you might imagine, and for some reason i could hardly find any useful information that could help me solve this problem... The mailboxes are supposed to be located under /var/spool/mail/virtual. After creating one of the users' folder manually, i now get an error of "unable to open the inbox" whenever i try to login.I need all the help i can get on this one... :)
Ok, so you've decided to place your mailboxes at that location. Unfortunately, Courier lacks the mindreading plugin module which allows it to determine where you decided the mailboxes should be created.
The standard, default location for maildirs is $HOME/Maildir, so whatever home directory you have specified for an individual account, Courier expects the account's mailbox to be $HOME/Maildir, and, as you've discovered yourself, it will complain if it's not there.
You neglected to state which authentication modules you are using, so nobody can help you any further. If you are using one of the standard system authentication modules, that read your passwd file, the home directory, the uid and gid is obtained from your /etc/passwd, or an equivalent. If you are using one of the other authentication modules: LDAP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, or userdb, the home directory is obtained from the appropriate attribute/database field that you've set in the appropriate configuration file. Some of these modules also provide for an extra mailbox field/attribute which can be used to override the $HOME/Maildir default, on a per-account basis, but you should refrain from messing with it until you have some more experience with the system.
I suggest that you begin by creating a single account's home directory, use maildirmake to create the Maildir subdirectory in that directory, taking care to use the same uid/gid for the Maildir as it's parent, home directory, then add the corresponding information to either your passwd file, your LDAP server, or your database table, whatever the case may be.
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