Managing IMAP

Authentication Tools

It’s becoming increasingly popular to opt out of using standard Unix authentication and to use database-based authentication instead. The advantages of alternative authentication methods are many. In many cases, you won’t necessarily want your users to have regular Unix accounts on your IMAP server, and storing usernames and passwords in an alternate database allows you to get around setting up Unix accounts for everyone. Another advantage, in the case of the UW server, is that you can run your IMAP daemon as a non-privileged user. This section introduces tools that allow alternative authentication methods.

Authenticating Against a SQL Database (UW)

getpg/UW-IMAP

Author

Alex Howansky ([e-mail])

URL

http://www.wankwood.com/getpg/uw-imap-latest.tar.gz

Major features

Allows UW IMAP to authenticate users against a PostgreSQL database.

Installation

Involves applying a patch to the UW IMAP source distribution.

Documentation

Documentation is contained in the README file included in the getpg/UW-IMAP package.

Status

Current version is 0.54 as of February 2000.

Dependencies

PostgreSQL, UW IMAP. Tested using qmail as the MTA.

Licensing

Unknown (free).

The getpg/UW-IMAP patch utilizes the getpg functions to allow the UW IMAP server to authenticate users against a PostgreSQL database. getpg, included in the getpg/UW-IMAP package, consists of a pair of C functions that are drop-in replacements for the standard getpwnam and getpwuid functions, which do Unix authentication. The ...