| 1 | Courier Authentication Library |
| 2 | |
| 3 | This is the Courier authentication library. Copies of this library code |
| 4 | used to exist in other tarballs: Courier, Courier-IMAP, and SqWebMail. |
| 5 | Building and installing any of these packages would've automatically |
| 6 | installed this authentication code. |
| 7 | |
| 8 | The authentication library is now a separate, standalone package. This |
| 9 | authentication library must now be installed, separately, before upgrading |
| 10 | to the following builds (or if installing them for the first time): |
| 11 | Courier 0.48, Courier-IMAP 4.0, and SqWebMail 5.0. See [1]NEWS for more |
| 12 | information. |
| 13 | |
| 14 | Download: [2]http://www.courier-mta.org/download.php#authlib |
| 15 | |
| 16 | Overview |
| 17 | |
| 18 | The Courier authentication library provides authentication services for |
| 19 | other Courier applications. In this context, the term "authentication" |
| 20 | refers to the following functions: |
| 21 | |
| 22 | 1. Take a userid or a loginid, and a password. Determine whether the |
| 23 | loginid and the password are valid. |
| 24 | 2. Given a userid, obtain the following information about the userid: |
| 25 | |
| 26 | A. The account's home directory. |
| 27 | B. The numeric system userid and groupid that owns all files |
| 28 | associated with this account. |
| 29 | C. The location of the account's maildir. |
| 30 | D. Any maildir quota defined for this account. See the Courier |
| 31 | documentation for more information on maildir quotas. |
| 32 | E. Other miscellaneous account-specific options. |
| 33 | |
| 34 | 3. Change the password associated with a loginid. |
| 35 | 4. Obtain a complete list of all loginids. |
| 36 | |
| 37 | The Courier authentication library provides alternative implementations of |
| 38 | these authentication services: |
| 39 | |
| 40 | 1. Use the traditional system password files: /etc/passwd and |
| 41 | /etc/shadow, possibly in conjunction with the PAM library. |
| 42 | 2. Maintain all this information in a GDBM or a DB database. The GDBM or |
| 43 | the DB database is compiled from plain text files. Perl scripts |
| 44 | provide a simple interface for creating and editing the authentication |
| 45 | information, then a script compiles the plain text files into a |
| 46 | database. |
| 47 | 3. Use an LDAP server for authentication. |
| 48 | 4. Use a table in a MySQL database for authentication. |
| 49 | 5. Use a table in a PostgreSQL database for authentication. |
| 50 | |
| 51 | All Courier components that use this authentication library, therefore, |
| 52 | will be able to authenticate E-mail accounts using any of the above |
| 53 | methods. |
| 54 | |
| 55 | Additional information can be found in the [3]INSTALL file. |
| 56 | |
| 57 | The authentication API is [4]documented. |
| 58 | |
| 59 | Further resources |
| 60 | |
| 61 | Subscribe to the courier-users mailing list: |
| 62 | [5]http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/courier-users. |