Again I made some small progress in getting a fully functional IMAP based mail server running on my Mac mini. After getting Postfix compiled with MySQL support I needed to get started on the IMAP end of things.

First downloading the source code as I couldn’t find any ready made packages I could just install. You can get Courier IMAP from here and the authentication library from here. I used version 4.0.6 of the IMAP server and version 0.57 of the authlib daemon.

The authlib daemon was as easy as ./configure, make and then as root do a ‘make install’ and ‘make install-configure’ and then tweak some of the configuration files. The IMAP server took more effort. It needed some parameters during the configuration stage, I took some values on a best guess effort but I still need to find out what they do exactly. I’ve got it compiled and running with:

./configure --prefix=/usr/local --with-authpwd=YES  --without-authcram
make
make install

Now I can read my emails from the server, still needed some configuration tweaking but more on that later. Still while trying to send mail to myself the mail address gets bounced in Postfix, I need to find out why. But to end on a positive note, my mail was copied into the send mail folder on the IMAP server !