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3.2. Configuration
To configure Dovecot, you can edit the file /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf and its included configfiles in / etc/dovecot/conf.d/. By default all installed protocols will be enabled via an include directive in /etc/ dovecot/dovecot.conf.
!include_try /usr/share/dovecot/protocols.d/*.protocol
IMAPS and POP3S are more secure because they use SSL encryption to connect. A basic self signed ssl certificate is automatically set up by package ssl-cert and used by dovecot in /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10- ssl.conf.
By default mbox format is configured, if required you can also use maildir. More about that can be found in the comments at /etc/dovecot/conf.d//10-mail.conf Further benefits and details are discussed on the Dovecot web site11.
You should configure your Mail Transport Agent (MTA) to transfer the incoming mail to the selected type of mailbox if it is different from the one you have configured.
Once you have configured dovecot, restart the Dovecot daemon in order to test your setup:
sudo systemctl restart dovecot.service
If you have enabled imap, or pop3, you can also try to log in with the commands telnet localhost pop3 or
telnet localhost imap2. If you see something like the following, the installation has been successful:
bhuvan@rainbow:~$ telnet localhost pop3 Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.localdomain.
11 https://wiki2.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat
Escape character is '^]'.
+OK Dovecot ready.