Managing IMAP

Appendix B. Adding SSL Support to IMAP

Many users use their web browser’s built-in email client to read their IMAP mail. Many browsers, such as Netscape and IE, are SSL-enabled, but because the current distribution versions of UW and Cyrus servers do not support SSL, the users can’t take advantage of their browser’s SSL support. There is, however, a workaround—you can use the freely available OpenSSL SSL toolkit and stunnel, an SSL encryption wrapper, to wrap IMAP in SSL. The procedure for adding SSL support to IMAP is documented in this appendix. It involves downloading some free software, building and installing it, generating a certificate, and modifying your inetd configuration.

UW 2000 and the 2.0 release of Cyrus will support native SSL and are expected to be released before this book is published.

Get the Software

The first step is to get the latest versions of the sources for OpenSSL and stunnel.

OpenSSL

http://www.openssl.org/

OpenSSL is a free implementation of Netscape’s Secure Socket Layer—the software encryption protocol behind the Netscape Secure Server and the Netscape Navigator Browser. OpenSSL implements Secure Sockets Layer SSLv2 (Version 2) and SSLv3 (Version 3) and Transport Layer Security (TLSv1).

Download the latest OpenSSL source distribution (Version 0.9.5a as of this writing), and unpack it where you normally build free software. The URL given at the beginning of this section is the master location for OpenSSL sources. At that URL you will also find useful ...