• Back to Dovecot homepage

• QuickConfiguration for people in hurry

• Why doesn't Dovecot work?

• Overview of how everything works together

• Mail protocols: IMAP, POP3 and SMTP

• Mail delivery agents and Sieve

• Mailbox formats

  • Dovecot's index files

• User authentication

  • SASL

It's a good idea to start with a simple Dovecot installation to see that everything works. After that you can start changing things one at a time, so if you run into trouble you know immediately where the problem is.

If you're in a hurry and you already know enough about mail servers, QuickConfiguration may be more helpful to you instead.

1. Installing

   • Compiling from sources

   • Installing prebuilt binaries

2. Checking where mail is delivered to

3. Configuring Dovecot

4. Running Dovecot

5. Logging

6. Testing that everything works

   • Testing POP3 installation

7. Finishing the test installation

• Configuration file syntax

• Starting guidelines

  • System users

  • Virtual users

  • System users used by Dovecot

• Authentication configuration

  • Password databases

  • User databases

  • Multiple authentication databases

  • Kerberos

  • Restricting users' access

  • Special authentication features

    • IMAP/POP3/LMTP Proxying

  • Master users

  • Caching

• Mailbox location configuration

  • Mails stored in local disk

  • Mails stored in shared filesystem (NFS, clustered FS).

    • Director for easily proxying same user to same server to avoid caching problems.

  • Maildir configuration

  • Mbox configuration

  • Namespaces

  • Shared mailboxes

• Mailbox settings

• Service settings

  • Login processes and their settings

• SSL settings and certificate creation

• Plugins

  • Quota

  • Access Control Lists (ACLs)

• Dovecot as a IMAP server

• Dovecot as a POP3 server

• LDA (Local Delivery Agent) and LMTP

• Sieve and ManageSieve

• Post-login scripting

• Replication with dsync

• HOWTOs, examples and tutorials for different installations

• Existing Dovecot installations

• From other IMAP/POP3 servers

  • My mailboxes are lost after migrating to Dovecot!

• Upgrading Dovecot to a new version

• Converting between mailbox formats (mbox <-> Maildir, etc.)

• Why doesn't Dovecot work?

• Finding the error message from logs

• Debugging authentication

• Process tracing is useful when Dovecot seems slow or hangs completely

• Rawlog can be used to log post-login IMAP/POP3 traffic

• mbox errors and crashes

• Client issues and configuration

  • Negative UIDs / message sets

  • Debugging using Thunderbird's logging

• Time moved backwards error

• %d expands to empty string

• pre-authenticated sessions

• Sending bug reports, debugging crashes and sniffing network traffic

• Performance tuning

• Security tuning

  • Chrooting

• Dovecot's design

• Client issues and configuration

• Timeout handling

• Dovecot Tools and Utilities

• Current features and roadmap / another features page (These need to be merged somehow)

• Testimonials

• OrphanedPages (that are not linked to by other pages)