Setting up an IMAP server for a small GP practice

An IMAP mail server for a practice is a huge advantage over the usual MS Outlook or Thunderbird email client connecting directly from the Desktop to NHSnet. Most of us have very slow bandwidth, so downloading the same attachments again and again can be a serious hog on everyone's time and can stop others within the same practice getting on with what they need to get on with.

Further, if you, like us, have a practice account into which all email flows, rather than NHSnet's idea of a personal account for everyone, you do want that everyone has instantaneous access to the same emails.

Finally, given the small quota on the NHS net server we have to contend with, we all require some storage for older emails which might still be important. Preferably this storage is commonly accessible and searchable.

So, setting up a central email server which downloads the emails from NHSnet and then serves it to the various desktop computers is the right way forward.

There are in principle two ways of reading emails from a central server: The POP3 way and the IMAP way. You might still know POP3 from dial-up times. It means that your inbox on the server is read out and emails sucked over to your client. IMAP is a whole lot more comfortable - you can have lots of folders, sub folders and the server and client keep each other in sync. You can, if you wish only read the headlines out and leave heavy attachments on the server.

If you use for your practice server Ubuntu or Debian Linux then you are only a few steps away from this aim:

sudo apt-get install dovecot

Dovecot is a very comfortable IMAP and POP server.

After installing it, it will be more or less ready to run.

Start up your favourite editor and change following lines in the default /etc/dovecot.conf:
protocols = imap imaps

You will not need POP3, so disable it.

default_mail_env = maildir:/home/%u/Maildir

This will ensure that dovecot uses Maildir format for inbox and all other folders. The Maildir is stored in each users /home directory.

Dovecot installed in this way will serve email for every user registered as normal unix user on the server. there are ample ways of creating virtual users, but for a small practice this is probably OTT.