Courier-authlib

From Qmail Info Wiki

courier-authlib is a stand-alone set of authentication libraries needed by recent versions of the courier-imap and sqwebmail packages.

The functions poovided by this library allow you to use a variety of methods to authenticate users and locate their mailboxes. Modules are provided to support the basic /etc/passwd (with or without /etc/shadow support) files, PAM (which should be used over the /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow modules whenever possible), vpopmail authentication, courier's /etc/userdb file, mysql, postgresql, and LDAP, along with a "custom" module which can be modified to support any authentication method you can write the C code for.

This module must be installed in order to use courier-imap version 4.0 or later, or recent versions of sqwebmail (not sure which version number started requiring it, if somebody knows, please edit this page and fill in the info.)

If you are installing a system using RPM files (using RedHat or one of its children) you should be aware that the instructions on the developer's web site (http://www.courier-mta.org/authlib/INSTALL.html#Building) will create RPM files which depend on FAM in order to provide asynchronous notification when the contents of a mailbox change (i.e. when new mail arrives.) While this is a good idea, FAM relies on the portmapper service, which is known for having security problems and is therefore probably not a good idea to run on a server which is exposed to the Internet. I have written a web page (http://www.jms1.net/courier/no-fam.shtml) explaining how to build the courier-authlib library without requring the FAM libraries.

Links

Home page for courier-authlib (http://www.courier-mta.org/authlib/)
The INSTALL file included with the source (http://www.courier-mta.org/authlib/INSTALL.html)

Index of John's courier-imap documents (http://www.jms1.net/courier/)
How to build courier-imap without FAM (http://www.jms1.net/courier/no-fam.shtml)