[courier-users] HowTo: Run courier-imap as non-root/non-privileged user

[Nick Bower]

I struggled considerably for a day trying to get courier-imap to run in a non-privileged general user account (it is a personal account on a server not administered by me).  Apart from the obvious and standard configuration tweaks, here are some additional required things I thought I'd share with other newish courier-imap users, as they're by no means obvious:

1) Even if you use --prefix in configure (eg --prefix=/export/home/nick/local/courier-imap), authuserdb's userdb is looked for in /etc/userdb, not in ${prefix}/etc/userdb!  authdaemond will not complain that it's not in /etc when you unknowingly place it in ${prefix}/etc so you may never know (until looking at the original Makefile) that the reason why things are running yet authentication is failing is that it's not finding the userdb file.  Use --with-userdb switch to configure (this is not shown by --help which is probably why I didn't twig earlier).

2) Even though the correct daemon processes seemed to be started, I still couldn't authenticate properly (even after realising 1 above).  I traced the problem to the following two lines in imapd.rc:

-stderrlogger=${exec_prefix}/sbin/courierlogger \
-stderrloggername=imapd \

Because courierlogger tries to log to a privileged area (again ignoring ${prefix}), you can't authenticate (I have no idea why).  I instead changed the above to:

-stderr=${prefix}/var/imapd \

and authentication stopped failing.

3) I'd submit the above two as change requests (having some features and not others obey ${prefix} doesn't make sense to me) if I could find any bug submission facilities on inter7.com or sourceforge.  Couldn't find any.

Cheers, Nick