Fedora¶

Fedora is a Linux distribution that does not generally enforce a policy of not providing you with upgrades of software during the life-cycle of any of the distribution’s released versions, or what could otherwise be expected to constitute “stable”.

While package maintainers tend to want to prevent unpleasant surprises from being deployed to your Fedora system, and therefore generally ship only versions of one series to any one given released distribution version, the Cyrus project cannot guarantee you will not receive an upgrade at some point, and cannot guarantee this upgrade will run smoothly – even though we do our best.

To install the version of Cyrus IMAP that comes with the operating system, issue the following command for Fedora 18 or below:

# yum install cyrus-imapd cyrus-sasl cyrus-sasl-plain

or for Fedora 19 and above:

# dnf install cyrus-imapd cyrus-sasl cyrus-sasl-plain

Next, set a password for the default administrative user cyrus:

# passwd cyrus
Changing password for user cyrus.
New password:
Retype new password:
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully.

Start and configure to start when the system boots, the saslauthd(8) service. For Fedora 14 and below:

# service saslauthd start
Starting saslauthd:                                        [  OK  ]
# chkconfig saslauthd on

or for Fedora 15 and above:

# systemctl start saslauthd
# systemctl enable saslauthd

You should at this moment be able to authenticate against saslauthd(8):

# testsaslauthd -u cyrus -p YOUR-PASSWORD

You should get an 0: OK "Success." message.

Start the service, and ensure the service starts up when the system boots. For Fedora 14 and below:

# service cyrus-imapd start
# chkconfig cyrus-imapd on

or for Fedora 15 and above:

# systemctl start cyrus-imapd
# systemctl enable cyrus-imapd

You should now be able to login as the cyrus user, which is configured by default as an administrator for Cyrus IMAP:

# imtest -t "" -u cyrus -a cyrus localhost
S: * OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4 IMAP4rev1 LITERAL+ ID STARTTLS LOGINDISABLED COMPRESS=DEFLATE] d5ec35c1414a Cyrus IMAP v2.3.16-Fedora-RPM-2.3.16-13.el6_6 server ready
C: S01 STARTTLS
S: S01 OK Begin TLS negotiation now
verify error:num=18:self signed certificate
TLS connection established: TLSv1.2 with cipher DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 (256/256 bits)
C: C01 CAPABILITY
S: * CAPABILITY IMAP4 IMAP4rev1 LITERAL+ ID AUTH=PLAIN SASL-IR COMPRESS=DEFLATE ACL RIGHTS=kxte QUOTA MAILBOX-REFERRALS NAMESPACE UIDPLUS NO_ATOMIC_RENAME UNSELECT CHILDREN MULTIAPPEND BINARY SORT SORT=MODSEQ THREAD=ORDEREDSUBJECT THREAD=REFERENCES ANNOTATEMORE CATENATE CONDSTORE SCAN IDLE LISTEXT LIST-SUBSCRIBED X-NETSCAPE URLAUTH
S: C01 OK Completed
Please enter your password:
C: A01 AUTHENTICATE PLAIN ************
S: A01 OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4 IMAP4rev1 LITERAL+ ID LOGINDISABLED COMPRESS=DEFLATE ACL RIGHTS=kxte QUOTA MAILBOX-REFERRALS NAMESPACE UIDPLUS NO_ATOMIC_RENAME UNSELECT CHILDREN MULTIAPPEND BINARY SORT SORT=MODSEQ THREAD=ORDEREDSUBJECT THREAD=REFERENCES ANNOTATEMORE CATENATE CONDSTORE SCAN IDLE LISTEXT LIST-SUBSCRIBED X-NETSCAPE URLAUTH] Success (tls protection)
Authenticated.
Security strength factor: 256
. LIST "" "*"
. OK Completed (0.000 secs 1 calls)
C: Q01 LOGOUT
* BYE LOGOUT received
Q01 OK Completed
Connection closed.

Next, continue with Configuring the MTA.

Other Versions of Cyrus IMAP¶

The following guides walk you through providing you with a version of the Cyrus IMAP software that is no longer mainstream, and as such the level of technical detail is advanced.