Just curious : any reason there's no SlackBuild for the Courier mail server at SBo? The various components are there -- Maildrop and Courier IMAP, for example, but not Courier-MTA, which is the mail server itself plus these components.

It's early in the morning here so forgive me if I'm overlooking something obvious.

I submitted the original slackbuild for courier-imapd (and -authlib and -unicode). I'm using it as an IMAP server with Postfix as MTA.

IIRC, I was using sendmail + courier (many years ago), and switched from sendmail to postfix at some point. The postfix+courier setup has been working great for me, so I haven't had any reason to try courier-mta.

So the short answer is: I have a use for courier-imapd, but not for courier-mta (which, just to be clear, I've never even looked at).

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Thank you. I was just curious whether there was a licence or security problem.

I did set up Postfix + Dovecot myself many years ago and I'm about to set up a mail server again. Looking at the options I thought why not have the Courier suite look after everything, from MTA to filtering, auth and IMAP. There's even a Courier mail client for the terminal -- Cone -- and a webmail client too.

I won't mark this Solved yet because I would like to hear from people using the Courier all-in-one solution.

I look after Maildrop and courier-unicode for SBo but this is because on my own setup I use Gmail --> Getmail --> Maildrop --> Mutt --> msmtp --> Gmail. I have had no use for the full setup.

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It's interesting to see the different mail workflows people have.

I see you have maildrop but no IMAP server ; does that mean Mutt accesses your maildirs directly, without going through an IMAP server?

No IMAP at all, I still use POP3 from Gmail. I tried IMAP when it became available through Gmail many years ago and did not like it at all.

Oh I see. But it's getmail doing the POP retrieval from the gmail servers? What I'm trying to get my head around is how Mutt accesses that mail once retrieved -- directly from the maildirs, or is there a local POP server?

So getmail from Gmail, mail is sorted with maildrop and mutt reads directly from either the sorted maildirs or the unsorted mail in the spool. Has worked well here for way over a decade...

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It's strange that Google returns almost nothing about setting up a mail server using just the components of the Courier suite and nothing else. That could be Google, of course, since they are effectively useless as a search engine these days. DDG threw up a walkthrough from 2011.

I do understand the appeal of Postfix and Dovecot, and set up a mail server using them, but even its home page has a warning that the much vaunted security of Postfix may be compromised as soon as you add third-party components to the chain -- citing Cyrus SASL as an example.

Courier has everything -- MTA, auth, IMAP, filtering. No need to stray outside its own ecosystem.

It's very strange that there are no reports about it in production. I'm truly curious if there's some flaw or security hole or performance shortfall driving admins to other setups.

Mods : perhaps this thread can be moved now to a more appropriate forum, since my Slackware-specific issue has been resolved.

Well, I would be happy to give up my piece of the ecosystem if somebody wanted to present the whole package on SBo. But whether there is a need or a desire for such a script might be another question?

It seems that Dovecot has its own SASL implementation, and its own filtering option -- Sieve. This at least reduces the number of parties involved in the mail chain.

But one of the features of Courier Maildrop that interested me is the possibility -- I think -- of piping a message to a shell command. I'm not sure about this ; if true, I would certainly welcome this feature at the MDA filtering stage. Before the MUA stage, in other words. My cursory glance at the Sieve docs suggests this is not a feature there.

Thanks for your thoughts. One of the triggers for my renewed interest in setting up some sort of mail server was my discovery that the elm client can parse incoming messages for calendar information. I wanted to get something similar working with a modern stack, since elm seems largely abandoned. Email myself reminders, which would be filtered by Maildrop and passed to Dianne Skoll's excellent remind program.

The man page maildropex gives the following:

I have never used this but it looks like what you are after...

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