Courier Mail Server

Courier mail server's Documentation

Please note that the online version of these manual pages reflect the installation directories used for development and testing. When you install the Courier mail server, the actual installation directory you use will be reflected in your manual pages.

Manual pages


Internal documentation (white papers)

The following stuff could be out of date, incomplete, or plainly wrong. An early version of these files were used for the initial design of the the Courier mail server mail server. As the Courier mail server was being developed, there were many slight changes from the original design. Hopefully, this documentation has been updated to reflect those changes... In some cases, stuff that's used to be here eventually migrated to the manual pages. This is a royal mess, you have been warned.

Directory Layout

Mail Queue

Transport Modules

Internal Structures

courierd Daemon Process

The local module

The esmtp module


The following documents describe the Courier mail server-specific ESMTP extensions.

The XEXDATA ESMTP extension is a useful extension to the format of the response to the DATA command, which allows for recipient-specified mail filters to be used.

The XVERP ESMTP extension allows for optimized distribution of mailing list messages with automatic bounce handling.

The XSECURITY ESMTP extension extends the existing SSL/TLS ESMTP extension to allow the implementation of a secure mail delivery infrastructure on top of an untrusted, public, network.