Setting up IMAPD on Leopard client, need suggestions re: launchd & firewall

[Diego Zamboni]

On Dec 5, 2007, at 11:04 PM, Chris Devers wrote:
> Out of curiosity, would anyone have any pointers on getting a basic  
> IMAP server running on Leopard client?

I am using Dovecot (http://www.dovecot.org/) on my machine as a local  
IMAP server. I installed it using macports, so it was quite easy:

	port install dovecot

The trickiest part for me was the authentication. To make it use the  
system accounts for authentication, I created /etc/pam.d/dovecot with  
the following:

# dovecot: auth account password session
auth       sufficient     pam_securityserver.so
auth       sufficient     pam_unix.so
auth       required       pam_deny.so
account    required       pam_permit.so
password   required       pam_deny.so
session    required       pam_uwtmp.so

And set the authentication section of /opt/local/etc/dovecot/ 
dovecot.conf as follows:

auth default {
mechanisms = plain

passdb pam {
   args = dovecot
}
userdb passwd {
}
user = root
}

I'm only using it from localhost, if you are using it remotely, you  
probably want to enable some more secure mechanisms (e.g. cram-md5).

Finally, start it as indicated by the post-install message from the  
port command:

	launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.dovecot.plist

Hope this helps,
--Diego