On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 07:47:28PM +0000, Bruce Cran wrote: > On Sun, 29 Nov 2009 11:30:18 -0800 > Gary Kline <[email protected]> wrote: > > > { One far, far OT question here: who can explain what dovecot > > is/does? why it even exists? I'm familiar with MTA's, like > > sendmail; likewise with MUA's, like evo, kmail, and mutt. > > It's time to learn another level of complexity, evidently....} > > Dovecot is an IMAP/POP3 server - sendmail lets you send mail, dovecot > lets you fetch it from a remote server.
There is one thing Dovecot offers (purely as a nicety; it has no relation to the IMAP/POP3 functionality of the daemon per se) which is unlike other IMAP/POP3 daemon -- its own SASL implementation. This allows for MTAs like Postfix and Exim to use the SASL feature of Dovecot to do user/pass authentication: http://wiki.dovecot.org/Sasl I consider this a major plus, given that I avoid Cyrus software like the plague. If you maintain a server which runs both a public-facing MTA which permits users to send mail through it (via SMTP AUTH) and an IMAP/POP3 daemon, then this feature of Dovecot is a blessing. Getting it to work with Postfix is incredibly simple -- 4 lines in main.cf, and a single line in master.cf; no need to rebuild all your software to link to a library, blah blah... -- | Jeremy Chadwick [email protected] | | Parodius Networking http://www.parodius.com/ | | UNIX Systems Administrator Mountain View, CA, USA | | Making life hard for others since 1977. PGP: 4BD6C0CB | _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[email protected]"
