On 18 Jul 2005 at 22:28, Robert Cates wrote about
"[exim] POP/IMAP and Exim (4.43)":
| it probably seems like a very obvious answer to my questions, but I'm just
| not experienced enough to know how these servers tie-in and work together...
They don't, pretty much.
| I have Courier and Exim installed and things seem to work ok, but I
| apparently do not have AUTHentication setup/configured, at least not with
| Exim. I've compiled Exim myself and included AUTH_CRAM_MD5=yes
| AUTH_PLAINTEXT=yes AUTH_SPA=yes, but when I 'telnet localhost 25' I do not
| get '250-AUTH PLAIN LOGIN CRAM-MD5'.
Did you read the authentication chapters in spec.txt? It is not
enough to compile in support for AUTH, you have to define one or more
authenticators in the exim.conf file. exim will only publish the
authenticators you define.
| And now to my questions - do I have to configure AUTHentication in Exim, in
| Courier, or both?
Courier, to be granted access to the user's mailbox. exim, if you
choose to require authentication for relay control (as opposed to
trusting hosts on the local network, say). They have nothing to do
with each other.
| Do I even need POP/IMAP servers with Exim, and if not,
| what would be a situation where I'd want POP/IMAP servers running?
That depends. POP and IMAP are services that provide access to user
mailboxes via TCP/IP. They are needed when the MUA does not have (or
does not support) direct access to the mailbox file(s) on the server,
as is the typical case.
exim is just an SMTP server. It has nothing to do with how messages
are downloaded/accessed by the MUA. The MUA connects to exim only to
*send* messages.
| As I see it, POP/IMAP servers are there to act as the front-end to the MTA
| for MUAs,
More like a backend, I'd say.
- Fred
