Dovecot is an open source IMAP and POP3 email server for Linux/UNIX-like
systems, written with security primarily in mind. Dovecot is an excellent
choice for both small and large installations. It's fast, simple to set up,
requires no special administration and it uses very little memory.
Dovecot is high-performing, self-optimizing, self-healing, and easily
extensible. It includes IMAP4rev1 and POP3 support. IPv6, SSL and TLS are
supported. It supports multiple commonly used IMAP extensions, including SORT,
THREAD and IDLE.
===> The following configuration options are available for dovecot-2.3.21.1_3:
DOCS=on: Build and/or install documentation
EXAMPLES=on: Build and/or install examples
LIBSODIUM=off: Support libsodium based crypts (ARGON2I/ARGON2ID)
LIBUNWIND=off: Get backtraces using libunwind
LIBWRAP=on: TCP wrapper support
LUA=off: Lua scripting language support
LZ4=off: LZ4 compression support
====> Database support
CDB=off: CDB database support
LDAP=on: LDAP protocol support
MYSQL=off: MySQL database support
PGSQL=off: PostgreSQL database support
SQLITE=off: SQLite database support
====> Full text search plugins
ICU=off: Use libicu for FTS unicode normalization
LUCENE=off: CLucene FTS support
SOLR=off: Solr FTS support
TEXTCAT=off: Libexttextcat FTS support
====> GSSAPI Security API support: you have to select exactly one of them
GSSAPI_BASE=off: Use GSSAPI from base
GSSAPI_HEIMDAL=off: Use Heimdal GSSAPI from security/heimdal
GSSAPI_MIT=off: Use MIT GSSAPI from security/krb5
GSSAPI_NONE=on: Build without GSSAPI support
===> Use 'make config' to modify these settings
You must create the configuration files yourself. Copy them over
to /usr/local/etc/dovecot and edit them as desired:
cp -R /usr/local/etc/dovecot/example-config/* \
/usr/local/etc/dovecot
The default configuration includes IMAP and POP3 services, will
authenticate users agains the system's passwd file, and will use
the default /var/mail/$USER mbox files.
Next, enable dovecot in /etc/rc.conf:
dovecot_enable="YES"
To avoid a risk of mailbox corruption, do not set the
security.bsd.see_other_uids or .see_other_gids sysctls to 0
if Dovecot is storing mail for multiple concurrent users (PR 218392).
Similarly, setting sysctls security.bsd.hardlink_check_uid or
security.bsd.hardlink_check_gid to 1 might result in non-working
mailboxes, depending on what mailbox locking mechanism is used
(PR 242223).
If you want to be able to search within attachments using the
decode2text plugin, you'll need to install textproc/catdoc, and
one of graphics/xpdf or graphics/poppler-utils.
There are some potentially breaking changes in Dovecot 2.3. If you
are upgrading from Dovecot 2.2:
* https://doc.dovecot.org/2.3/installation_guide/upgrading/from-2.2-to-2.3/
* Merge the configuration file changes from
/usr/local/etc/dovecot/examples-config/
If removing:
If you are removing dovecot permanently, you should 'rm -rf /var/db/dovecot' to
clear out any remaining data.
