Goodbye Courier-IMAP, Hello Dovecot

Posted on December 21, 2006 by Michael Schurter

While putting the finishing touches on the new mail server I blogged about before, I got fed up with Courier-IMAP and went with Dovecot instead. I wish I could tell you all kinds of technical reasons why Dovecot is superior, but I don’t know any.

In fact Courier probably has a lot more features than Dovecot, but one look at the plethora of configuration files in /etc/courier and I ran. Dovecot is well documented, and I only had to change 2 settings from their defaults. What more could you ask for?

Update: Dovecot just got even better! I just realized I can use Dovecot for Postfix’s SASL authentication instead of running the separate saslauthd daemon! Very easy to setup as well.

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  • http://www.jackpo.org Ming Jack Po

    completely agree. Courier-imap requires a ridiculous number of random config files and it was driving me insane. So as I was transitioning from Gentoo to CentOS, got rid of Courier-imap for dovecot too.. w00t!

  • AC

    woohoo! we have movie sign! (I just coaxed dovecot to life on our server, it was a little bit more complex than yours as the process was an amalgamation of how-to’s)

  • http://www.claudiokuenzler.com Claudio

    LOL it was pretty much the same decision I took as you did. I had to change some Courier settings and it took me around 2 hours because the settings are spread in the system and its horribly complicated (at least if you’re not into it).
    My new mailservers run with dovecot and it took me 10mins to set that up!