On Friday, Dec 6, 2002, at 04:48 US/Pacific, Jeff AA wrote:
Second the recommendation for courier.
Remember that pop3 by default is insecure in that user/passwords
pass in the clear over the net - DON'T make your mail users real users
with shell access or you are opening a large number of doors and putting
out a nice big 'Hack here!' flag. A little tcpdump on your segment will
get you a nice list of all the users / passwords for all your pop users
-
use pop-ssl instead.
regards
Jeff
I've already taken care of login security with my standard security
policy. SSH is the only remote login daemon available on the server.
Password authentication is disabled. Any access to the box must be
done with key authentication. Accounts with pop access (if /etc/passwd
is used for authentication) will have a /bin/false shell, and a
read-only .ssh directory where no authorized-keys file exists. 98% of
the usage on this mail server will be my own accounts. I won't be
hosting any clients, but I will be hosting a couple of friends here
and there. Of course, that could change in the future, and clients may
very well be included in the plan. Because of this, the pop3 access
with some time of encrypted authentication (pops apop) is entirely for
my own convenience so as to prevent from having to setup an ssh port
forward each time I want to check my mail while away from home. I am
not concerned with the transparency of the messages themselves, as
anything sensitive will be encrypted with GPG. Qpopper definitely
interests me, but it hasn't developed enough of a secure history yet
with version 4. I think I'll keep an eye on it's development and
perhaps use it at a later time. For now, I'm still looking at popa3d,
courier, and UofW, as is recommended by some of you.