Dovecot Proxy

Dovecot supports proxying IMAP, POP3, Submission, LMTP, ManageSieve, and doveadm connections to other hosts. The proxies jobs are typically:

• Handle SSL/TLS encryption
• Authenticate the user
• Redirect to the user's current Backend

The proxying can be done for all users, or only for some specific users. There are two ways to do the authentication:

1. Forward the password to the remote server. The proxy may or may not perform authentication itself. This requires that the client uses only cleartext authentication mechanism, or alternatively the proxy has access to users' passwords in cleartext.
2. Let Dovecot proxy perform the authentication and login to remote server using the proxy's master password. This allows client to use also non-cleartext authentication mechanism.