The Courier Mail Server

# Courier Mail Server

Copyright 1998-2012 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/groupware server based on open commodity protocols, such as ESMTP, IMAP, POP3, LDAP, SSL, and HTTP. Courier provides ESMTP, IMAP, POP3, webmail, and mailing list services within a single, consistent, framework. Individual components can be enabled or disabled at will. The Courier mail server now implements basic web-based calendaring and scheduling services integrated in the webmail module. Advanced groupware calendaring services will follow soon.

The Courier mail server's source code should compile on most POSIX-based operating systems based on Linux, and BSD-derived kernels. The Courier mail server should also compile on Solaris and AIX, with some help from Sun's or IBM's freeware add-on tools for their respective operating systems.

The Courier mail server evolved out of several related projects, that merged together (more on that later). The Courier mail server implements SMTP extensions for mailing list management and spam filtering. The Courier mail server can function as an intermediate mail relay, relaying mail between an internal LAN and the Internet, or perform final delivery to mailboxes. The Courier mail server uses maildirs as its native mail storage format, but it can also deliver mail to legacy mailbox files as well. The Courier mail server's configuration is set by plain text files and Perl scripts. Most of The Courier mail server's configuration can now be adjusted from a web browser, using The Courier mail server's web-based administration module.

The Courier mail server can provide mail services for regular operating system accounts. The Courier mail server can also provide mail services for virtual mail accounts, managed by an LDAP, MySQL, or PostgreSQL-based authentication database.

Certain portions of the Courier mail server - the mail filtering engine, the webmail server and the IMAP server - are also available as separate, smaller, packages that can be used with other mail servers.