# courier vs. courier-imap ebuild (smtp or not smtp)

## trapni

Hi all,

well, that's true, courier is still masked, but it's very nearly the same then courier-imap. So, what are the goals of the developer here?

Well I noticed that courier has smtp support, courier-imap not, and smtp is what I want.

Regards,

Christian Parpart.

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## Nitro

Courier is the actual mail server.  You will learn that most mail servers by default do not provide very flexible (if any), pop3/imap server solutions.  The mail servers (courier, qmail, sendmail, postfix, exim),  simply take the connection they recieve on the smtp port, and deliver it to the filesystem.  Once it is there, it sit there, and there really is no way to read it unless you have a shell account and something like pine.  This is where courier-imap steps it.  It provides standard and SSL connections for both the pop3 and imap servers.  I personally have never messed with courier mailserver by itself, but I love courier-imap.

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## jtanner

The courier-imap ebuild is just the imap server. 

The courier ebuild is the imap server, the smtp server, the pop server and (I believe) the webmail server.  For more info, check out http://www.courier-mta.org

Jim

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## trapni

Well, it look like I'm going to setup courier for production use since it supports pop3/imap (+ssl) and smtp. I checked out courier-imap it's good, but just a subset of courier; I dunno much about postfix and do not really like qmail; postfix is nice (no experiences about). So I conclude that the yet masked courier package is my favorit, even if it seems still incomplete as I've tested it on my desktop  :Smile: 

p.s.: well, of course, I do search before, but I've been awake since to many hours on that write.  :Embarassed: 

Cheers,

Christian Parpart

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