Ever wanted to setup a mail server complete with IMAP and POP access, one that was easy to configure and install and had a low memory footprint. Well I too wanted to have such a setup and after having tried Exim, Postfix together with Courier and Dovecot, I am pretty pleased with what Dovecot has to offer.

Dovecot installed like a charm and has a very low memory footprint. While earlier I was using Postfix with Courier (for POP and IMAP access), and it was quite a pain. Courier was consuming a lot of memory and doesn’t quite have an easily understandable configuration.

I did try my hands on Cyrus too but its very difficult to grasp and has out-dated and sparse documentation, to say the least.

So my recommendation is if you want to have a basic Mail Server setup complete with POP and IMAP access (over SSL too), and you are spare too much resources, then go for Postfix with Dovecot, you are going to love it – easy to install and configure. I had one setup and running in under 15 minutes.

Following is an awesome guide that will get you going in no time. I hope you enjoy your time doing the installation 🙂

Host Email with Postfix, Dovecot and MySQL on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid)