[Dovecot] mail accounts for users without home dirs

[Bob Hall]

On Tue, Aug 26, 2003 at 12:39:42AM +0200, Gunter Ohrner wrote:
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> Hi!
> 
> I use dovecot on a machine where users without an existing home directory (Not 
> my idea...) need to access their mailboxes. Unfortunately dovecot tries to 
> chdir to the users home directory before allowing IMAP access - is there 
> anything I can do about that besides creating a dummy-homedirectory for these 
> users?

I have a similar set up; none of the mail accounts correspond to an 
account in my passwd file. I have a postoffice account in the passwd file 
that owns the /var/mail directories where mail is stored. I use LDAP to 
assign each user the UID number for the postoffice account so that 
Dovecot's imap process can work with their mail. The postoffice home 
directory receives the raw log entries, and the account runs some 
related cron jobs that help manage the mail. So basically, I have one
Unix account and home directory to handle all mail users. If you don't 
want to deal with LDAP, you should be able to do something similar with 
PgSQL, or perhaps one of the other supported user databases. The key is 
always passing the postoffice UID number to Dovecot, regardless of the 
user.

Bob Hall