Network Security Hacks

Encrypt IMAP and POP with SSL

Keep your email safe from prying eyes while also protecting your POP and IMAP passwords.

Having your email available on an IMAP server is invaluable when you have to access your email from multiple locations. Unlike POP, IMAP stores all your email and any folders you create on the server, so you can access all of your email from whatever email client you decide to use. You can even set up a web-based email client so that messages can be accessed from literally any machine with an Internet connection and a web browser. But more than likely, you will need to cross untrusted networks along the way. How do you protect your email account password and email from others with less than desirable intentions? You use encryption, of course!

If you already have an IMAP or POP daemon installed that does not have the ability to use SSL natively, you can use stunnel [Hack #76] to wrap the service in an SSL tunnel. If you’re starting from scratch, you have the luxury of choosing a daemon that has SSL support compiled directly into the binary.

One daemon that supports SSL out of the box is the University of Washington’s IMAP daemon, otherwise known as UW-IMAP (http://www.washington.edu/imap/). The IMAP daemon is included with their IMAP software distribution.

To compile and install the IMAP daemon, download the compressed tar archive and run commands similar to these:

$ tar xfz imap.tar.Z 
$ cd imap-2002e
$ make lnp SSLDIR=/usr SSLCERTS=/usr/share/ssl/certs

The Makefile ...