I’ve been trying to get Postfix with IMAP folders working on my Mac mini for some time now. I even got to the point where I was willing to spend money on the Postfix Enabler just to get it working. But yesterday I found out why this isn’t going to work for me, it’s all about user authentication and management. It seems that Postfix and UW IMAP (the IMAP implementation from the Univesity of Washington) are build with Apple’s idea of user management. Which means that each user of my mail server must be created as an actual user on the Mac mini and can not be authorized or managed by a seperate administration.

I found this out while having a talk with Bernard Teo from CutEdgeSystems.com on if the postfix enabler supported virtual domains. Bernard was and is one of the fastest email responders I ever encountered when asking support on a piece of software, he responded within 5 minutes. He explained that, despite claims in several forums that it wouldn’t work, I could configure virtual domains with the Postfix enabler as long as each user on each domain had a seperate mailbox and that was not what I was looking for. I want mailboxes for as many users as it takes while having just one user enabled on my Mac. It’s going to be a web server for many small domains and I want to be able to handle the e-mail traffic for all those domains with a minimum of hassle like I have on my current Debian servers.

I now will start looking for the best place to get the source code for Postfix with installation and configuration help. I guess that now I’m going to compile it I will use all the other features I wanted to use from the beginning like MySQL support and for the Courier IMAP server , which in turn would mean that I can provide web based email services using SquirrelMail.

Wish me luck…