The original post: /r/nginx by /u/Ana4doves on 2024-08-07 18:49:39.

Good day everyone!

I have been searching everywhere for an IMAP proxy I can actually configure and use. I tried Dovecot, Courier and Cyrus, and probably for the lack of my techincal skills but I cannot piece together the elements to configure an IMAP proxy, figuratively and literally.

So far NGINX has been the most promising, actually having a guide on how to configure and set up the service. Sadly I simply cannot get it to work. NGINX says to compile it yourself with

./configure --with-mail --with-mail_ssl_module --with-openssl=[DIR]/openssl-1.1.1

and my first problem was with OpenSSL. First of all I tried on Debian 12 where I could not for the life of me compile OpenSSL and at that point I decided to check what OS if recommended for NGINX and I went with Alpine.

I managed to compile OpenSSL in Alpine ignoring what the guide said to use

./Configure darwin64-x86_64-cc --prefix=/usr

because using “darwin64-x86_64-cc” resulted in the make command erroring, saying it doesnt recognize “-arch” (In Debian too). So i simply ran “./configure --prefix=/usr” and it was successful.

Then came compiling NGINX. My problem was the “–with-openssl=[DIR]/openssl-1.1.1”. No “openssl-1.1.1” directory exists. Took me too long to figure out but with that prefix option I actually set for OpenSSL to be there.

So when I tried to compile NGINX, run the ./configure with the parameters and openssl pointing to that /usr/ssl directory, it errors out, saying it cannot find a ./configure file. So out of curiosity I set the openssl parameter to point at the extracted, configured, made and made installed openssl-1.1.1v folder and it ran for a good 15 minutes , it looked like its compiling OpenSSL again, but after its done giving out the “nginx” command does nothing.

I have been trying this for the third day in a row, sitting over compile screens, setting up VM’s and Im burned out. My only purpose for this is to send/recieve mail from an old hobby phone I got. Postfix was so easy to set up to send mail, Im stumped on this. The guides Im looking at are:

https://docs.nginx.com/nginx/admin-guide/mail-proxy/mail-proxy/

https://docs.nginx.com/nginx/admin-guide/installing-nginx/installing-nginx-open-source/#sources

Can anyone help me or point out what Im doing wrong, maybe suggest another OS or IMAP proxy? I take this as a learning project for Linux in general, but I really do need help with this.

Thank you for your time!