<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content= "text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <title>README</title> </head> <body> <h1>Courier Authentication Library</h1> <p>This is the Courier authentication library. Copies of this library code used to exist in other tarballs: Courier, Courier-IMAP, and SqWebMail. Building and installing any of these packages would've automatically installed this authentication code.</p> <p>The authentication library is now a separate, standalone package. This authentication library must now be installed, separately, before upgrading to the following builds (or if installing them for the first time): Courier 0.48, Courier-IMAP 4.0, and SqWebMail 5.0. See <a href="NEWS.html">NEWS</a> for more information.</p> <p>Download: <a target="_blank" href= "http://www.courier-mta.org/download.php#authlib">http://www.courier-mta.org/download.php#authlib</a></p> <h2>Overview</h2> <p>The Courier authentication library provides authentication services for other Courier applications. In this context, the term "authentication" refers to the following functions:</p> <ol> <li>Take a userid or a loginid, and a password. Determine whether the loginid and the password are valid.</li> <li>Given a userid, obtain the following information about the userid: <ol type="A"> <li>The account's home directory.</li> <li>The numeric system userid and groupid that owns all files associated with this account.</li> <li>The location of the account's maildir.</li> <li>Any maildir quota defined for this account. See the Courier documentation for more information on maildir quotas.</li> <li>Other miscellaneous account-specific options.</li> </ol> </li> <li>Change the password associated with a loginid.</li> <li>Obtain a complete list of all loginids.</li> </ol> <p>The Courier authentication library provides alternative implementations of these authentication services:</p> <ol> <li>Use the traditional system password files: <code>/etc/passwd</code> and <code>/etc/shadow</code>, possibly in conjunction with the PAM library.</li> <li>Maintain all this information in a GDBM or a DB database. The GDBM or the DB database is compiled from plain text files. Perl scripts provide a simple interface for creating and editing the authentication information, then a script compiles the plain text files into a database.</li> <li>Use an LDAP server for authentication.</li> <li>Use a table in a MySQL database for authentication.</li> <li>Use a table in a PostgreSQL database for authentication.</li> </ol> <p>All Courier components that use this authentication library, therefore, will be able to authenticate E-mail accounts using any of the above methods.</p> <p>Additional information can be found in the <a href= "INSTALL.html">INSTALL</a> file.</p> <p>The authentication API is <a href= "authlib.html">documented</a>.</p> <h2>Further resources</h2> <p>Subscribe to the courier-users mailing list: <a href= "http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/courier-users"><code> http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/courier-users</code></a>.</p> </body> </html>