I prefer to provide an IMAP server instead of a POP3 server for my users. It makes it a lot easier to provide web based mail-services if you use an IMAP server. Courier has one of the best IMAP servers available. By the way, you can use this server for POP3 as well and run both servers concurrently, how to do this is discussed when we go configuring. You can find the software at it’s home-page. Make sure you download the correct package from the download page. Please note that this is the 64 bit mode installation which requires a 64 bit MySQL installation otherwise you will get compiler errors.

When you’ve downloaded the software extract the source archive into a directory where we can compile it. Start a Terminal session and go into the directory you just extracted the software in and follow the instructions. First to make sure we don’t get any compiler errors you have to set this parameter:

RANLIB=”ranlib -c”
export RANLIB

This will prevent compiler errors, if you didn’t issue this command as the first one you will get an error saying :

“Undefined symbols: _rfc1035_default_resolver”

Next configure the make files with the authentication modules you just created and build the executables:

For Intel use:
CFLAGS=”-arch x86_64″ \
CXXFLAGS=”-arch x86_64″ \
./configure --prefix=/usr/local \
--with-authpwd=YES \
--without-authcram \
COURIERAUTHCONFIG=/usr/local/bin/courierauthconfig

For PowerPC use
CFLAGS=”-arch ppc64″ \
CXXFLAGS=”-arch ppc64″ \
./configure --prefix=/usr/local \
--with-authpwd=YES \
--without-authcram \
COURIERAUTHCONFIG=/usr/local/bin/courierauthconfig

Follow for both with:

make

When the compilation is finished you can install the software:

sudo make install

If this is a new install you can create fresh configuration files by issuing:

sudo make install-configure

Next step: Setting up the database for mailserver administration