Welcome IPv4 user
PING6
25Jul/100

Email via IPv6 on cPanel

Both the Courier and Dovecot mailservers can be used with cPanel to provide users with POP3 or IMAP access to their mail.

Many older cPanel installations will be running Courier. Interestingly Courier's default config already has IPv6 enabled by default. IPv4 addresses in log files are written in IPv6 compatible format by prepeding them with "::ffff:".

In order to connect to your mail server via IPv6 you can open your favourite mail client (Thunderbird is known to work) and set the server name to your servers IPv6 address. View the log files at "/var/log/maillog" to see your client login via IPv6.

Next step would be to add a DNS entry for your mail server. If you are the only user on your mail domain then you can add the IPv6 address of your server as a AAAA record for mail.yourdomain.co.za. If you have many other users on your domain then you may want to rather add the AAAA for mail6.yourdomain.co.za. Users with broken IPv6 connectivity may experience higher latency or inability to connect if the AAAA is applied directly to the 'mail' hostname.

Dovecot requires one change to enable IPv6: the listen directive needs to be adjusted to include both IPv4 and IPv6. Access the dovecot config template and add the line "listen = *, [::]" and rebuild the config. This should make dovecot IPv6 capable but this has not been tested.