Dovecot IMAP Smart Proxy

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reachmedia
Posts: 12
Joined: Mon Jun 20, 2016 1:25 pm

Dovecot IMAP Smart Proxy

Post by reachmedia »

Dear All,

I would like to integrate ME Enterprise with the above to proxy my IMAP connections. Please advise if this is possible.

http://www.dovecot.fi/products/

Dovecot can be used as a “smart proxy” in front of another IMAP server. In this configuration Dovecot talks to the IMAP client using a standard compliant and extension rich IMAP protocol, while downloading mails from the “real” backend IMAP server using a more simplified IMAP protocol.

Internally the backend IMAP server is treated as just another mail storage backend (like Maildir). This has many uses, including:

Fixing IMAP servers
Dovecot is fully IMAP protocol standards compliant with support for many IMAP extensions. Some servers have only barely implemented the necessary functionality to support the most widely used IMAP clients. Using less common IMAP clients may work badly or not at all with these servers. Many servers also don’t behave correctly with certain mails or with multiple clients accessing the mailbox, which results in poor user experience. If you are not able migrate your IMAP server to Dovecot, you can still easily solve these problems by adding a Dovecot IMAP Proxy in front of your real IMAP server.

Giving secure access to mails via IMAP
Some companies don’t trust their IMAP server enough to make it open to the entire public Internet. VPNs may be allowed, but they may not be supported by all the mobile phones and other devices that employees wish to use. Dovecot has many security hardening features, which provide users’ mail privacy. Opening a hardened Dovecot IMAP Proxy to public Internet has been more acceptable to our customers.

Improving performance with caching
IMAP Proxy uses regular Dovecot index/cache files. This may improve performance for “online” type IMAP clients, such as webmail’s, if the backend IMAP server is slow or has high latency. Mails can also be indexed and searched locally using a full text search index. In future the entire emails may be precached.

Modifying emails on the fly
IMAP Proxy allows plugins to modify the mails before they are sent to IMAP clients. This may be useful for various purposes, such as automatically decrypting encrypted emails for clients that don’t support them.

reachmedia
Posts: 12
Joined: Mon Jun 20, 2016 1:25 pm

Re: Dovecot IMAP Smart Proxy

Post by reachmedia »

How to extend mailenable proxy features?

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