Managing IMAP

Configuring the MTA

Unlike the UW server, Cyrus IMAP’s mailstore format ties it intrinsically to the local mail transport agent or, more accurately, to the local mail delivery agent. In this book, we’re presuming that you’ve chosen sendmail as your MTA. sendmail can serve just about any size user base. If, however, you elect to use another MTA, be mindful of the fact that you’ll have to configure it to use the Cyrus deliver program as a delivery agent, and use this section as a rough guide.

The deliver MDA

The Cyrus deliver program is the mail delivery agent that drops mail messages into users’ mailboxes. deliver takes a mail message on standard input and delivers it to the specified mailboxes. deliver  ’s configuration options are set in /etc/imapd.conf.

deliver uses the options listed in Table 8-2 when invoked to deliver mail. Other options are described in the deliver  (8) manual page.

Table 8-2. deliver Options

Option	Description
-mmailbox	Deliver a message to the Cyrus mailbox mailbox. To deliver to a specific mailbox, for example user.johndoe.lists, use deliver -m user.johndoe.lists You must have p access rights on the specified mailbox; if you don’t, then delivery fails and returns the message:[a] user.johndoe.lists: Mailbox does not exist If a mailbox is specified with the –m argument and a username argument is given, then deliver will attempt delivery to the specified mailbox under the mailbox hierarchy belonging to the username. For example, the command: /usr/cyrus/bin/deliver ...