snowbox.8

.\" Snowbox manpage
.\"
.\" This manpage is copyrighted by Oliver Feiler 2004-2008
.\"                                <kiza@kcore.de>
.\"
.TH SNOWBOX 8 "25 July 2008" "Snowbox 1.0"
.SH NAME
.B Snowbox
\- a POP3 server
.SH SYNPOSIS
.B snowbox
.SH DESCRIPTION
Snowbox is a small and  secure POP3 server written in Perl. It runs exclusively
from inetd. For a more complete list of features and further documentation
see its webpage at http://snowbox.kcore.de/.
.P
For installation instructions please refer to the file INSTALL included
with the distribution.
.P
.B Snowbox configuration
.P
The main configuration files are in /etc/snowbox. If Snowbox finds them there
it reads the settings, otherwise it uses internal defaults.
.P
.B The main configuration file
.br
(/etc/snowbox/config)
.P
Editing of this file is not required. Default settings should be fine on a
variety of systems. The following settings can be changed with this file.
.P
.B authfile:
.br
This is the location of the user authentication file. Snowbox  reads which
users to let in and their passwords from this file. See the section below
for a description of this file.
.P
.B maildir:
.br
This is the location of the system's mail spool directory. Usually this is
/var/mail where your MTA dumps mails.
.P
.B maildir_gid:
.br
This is the group ID of the mail spool directory. The mail spool
should be writable for this group as Snowbox changes to this GID and creates
a .lock file here during the session.
.P
.B loglevel:
.br
For normal operation leave loglevel at default setting (1). Possible values
are:
.br
0:    disable logging
.br
1:    default
.br
2:    unusual events usually only interesting for debugging
.br
3:    logs every connection and sent command. Aka "I want more noise in my syslog" mode.
.P
.B The user authentication file
.br
(/etc/snowbox/user.auth)
.P
This is the user authentication file. It should be owned by root and have
strict file permissions. The default format is:
.P
username <blank space> password
.P
The blank space can be whitespaces or tabs and as much you need for cool
looking ASCII art config files.
.P
.B Advanced configuration options
.P
Snowbox reads the users' mailboxes from the path you have configured in the
config file + username. It is possible to override the location of the
maildrop for each user. To do this, change the lines in the user.auth file
so that it contains the following 4 fields:
.P
username
.br
password
.br
/path/to/maildrop_file
.br
system_username (optional)
.P
The system_username is the owner of the maildrop file on your system. If it is
different from the login username you
.B must
specify it or snowbox will fail to change to that user ID.
.P
Examples:
.P
kiza    foobar    /home/kiza/mailbox
.P
Snowbox will login the user "kiza" with the password "foobar" and read
mails from "/home/kiza/mailbox" for this user. (Instead of the default
location)
.P
kiza2   foobar    /home/kiza/mailbox2    kiza
.P
Snowbox will login the user "kiza2" with the password "foobar", read the
mails from "/home/kiza/mailbox2", but change to user "kiza" instead "kiza2"
when opening the mailbox.
.P
.B Launching snowbox
.P
Snowbox runs from inetd. If you fear that someone might DoS your system
by opening tons of connections to the POP3 port you need to tell your
inetd to limit the maximum concurrent connections to the port.
Put the following line into your /etc/inetd.conf:
.P
.B pop3	stream	tcp	nowait	root	/usr/local/sbin/snowbox	snowbox
.P
and restart inetd. If you're using xinetd or any other implementation you
will need to figure out yourself how to get it running. ;) Feel free to
mail me the config for inclusion in this manpage.
.P
That's it. If everything is ok you should be able to use the server now.
.P
Snowbox is released under the GNU General Public License version 2.
.SH FILES
/usr/local/sbin/snowbox
.br
/etc/snowbox/config
.br
/etc/snowbox/user.auth
.SH AUTHOR
Oliver Feiler <kiza@kcore.de>