Courier Mail Server |
Copyright 1998-2001 Double Precision, Inc. This software is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. See COPYING for additional information.
The Courier mail transfer agent (MTA) is an integrated mail server suite that provides ESMTP, IMAP, POP3, webmail, and mailing list services within a single, consistent, framework. It grew out of several related projects, that merged together (more on that later). Courier implements SMTP extensions for mailing list management and spam filtering. Courier can function as an intermediate mail relay, relaying mail between an internal LAN and the Internet, or perform final delivery to mailboxes. Courier uses maildirs as its native mail storage format, but it can also deliver mail to legacy mailbox files as well. Courier is configured using plain text files and Perl scripts. Most of Courier's configuration can also be set from a web-based configuration module.
Certain portions of Courier - the mail filtering engine, the webmail server and IMAP server - are also available are standalone packages that can be used with other mail servers.
The source code for Courier includes documentation in HTML and manual page format. The HTML version of Courier's documentation can be browsed below. The documentation on the web may vary slightly from the documentation that comes with the current tarball snapshot or build. Usually the HTML documentation in the CVS Repository gets updated first, then the version that's published on the web, and the changes will then be rolled into the next tarball snapshot.
Please note that the online version of these manual pages reflect the installation directories used for development and testing. When you install Courier, the actual installation directory you use will be reflected in your manual pages.
courierpop3d, courierpop3login(8)
courieruucp(8), makeuucpneighbors(8)
makesmtpaccess(8), makesmtpaccess-msa(8)
The following stuff could be out of date, incomplete, or plainly wrong. An early version of these files were used for the initial design of the Courier mail server. As Courier was being developed, there were many slight changes from the original design. Hopefully, this documentation has been updated to reflect those changes... In some cases, stuff that's used to be here eventually migrated to the manual pages. This is a royal mess, you have been warned.
The following documents describe Courier-specific ESMTP extensions.
The XEXDATA ESMTP extension is a useful extension to the format of the response to the DATA command, which allows for recipient-specified mail filters to be used.
The XVERP ESMTP extension allows for optimized distribution of mailing list messages with automatic bounce handling.
The XSECURITY ESMTP extension extends the existing SSL/TLS ESMTP extension to allow the implementation of a secure mail delivery infrastructure on top of an untrusted, public, network.