imapproxy is a application aware (POP3/IMAP) proxy, which enables webmailers such as SquirrelMail or Roundcube to save on roundtrips by using a local low-latency connection to a mail server over a high-latency connection that is being kept open.

SquirrelMail as well as imapproxy is very outdated software and you may not want to use it. However, if you really want, you may want to compile it yourself as shown in the rest of this article.

That is, because in Ubuntu’s case, the latest you can get is labeled “1.2.8~svn20171105-2”, hinting for some old version from 2017.

The little work that went into the imapproxy, just a few commits, happened between 2017 and 2024. To get that also, fetch the latest version from their svn repo.

To compile on Ubuntu 20.04 and up, because of OpenSSL >=1.1.1, somme minor changes are required. I incorporated them in a commit on GitHub, where I also copied the whole imapproxy directory from the official SVN repo.

apt update && apt install make gcc git libssl-dev libwrap0-dev libncurses-dev
git clone https://github.com/maltris/imapproxy && cd imapproxy
./configure
make

After this, there should be a file named “in.imapproxyd” in the bin-folder. Run it as you wish.

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