Posted by: kfieldho
on September 09, 2008 11:53 PM
Postfix is a Mail Transport Agent (MTA) (qmail and sendmail are two other popular ones). It's primary responsibility is to accept mail (typically from other other servers) and make sure it goes where it belongs. Most commonly this means that mail is distributed to different user accounts on the system Postfix is running on. On Ubuntu (and most other distributions) Postfix (or whatever MTA the distribution uses) is configured to run Procmail whenever a piece of email arrives. Procmail is essentially a mail filtering program that processes an incoming email according to a set of rules a user can define in his or her .procmailrc. Usually this means that the mail is removed from the primary Inbox and placed in some other location but just about anything is possible. So, basically Postfix and Procmail work together to take the email that they receive from Fetchmail and put it in appropriate locations on the server.
Dovecot is primarily responsible to making mail thats on the server available to email clients like Thunderbird. As it happens, Dovecot doesn't particularly care (or know) how that mail comes to be where it is, it only knows how to make it available to email client.
To sumamrize: Postfix and Procmail manage the arrival of mail. Dovecot manages access to mail. As long as Postfix/Procmail puts the mail where Dovecot expects to see it, everything works.
Learn about Linux
Download Linux
Get Linux help
Re: How to build a local IMAP server
Posted by: kfieldho on September 09, 2008 11:53 PMDovecot is primarily responsible to making mail thats on the server available to email clients like Thunderbird. As it happens, Dovecot doesn't particularly care (or know) how that mail comes to be where it is, it only knows how to make it available to email client.
To sumamrize: Postfix and Procmail manage the arrival of mail. Dovecot manages access to mail. As long as Postfix/Procmail puts the mail where Dovecot expects to see it, everything works.
#