[Dovecot] LDAP bind questions

[Jared]

Hello,

I've got dovecot set up to authenticate against our LDAP server.  So 
far seems to work well.

I have two concerns that I haven't been able to find answers for in the 
documentation or archives.

Is there any intention to support "authentication binds" so you don't 
have to bind as a user with read privileges to everyone's userPassword 
attribute? For security purposes I'd like to see this functionality.

And my next concern would become a non-issue if the above was 
supported, but is there a way to set the dnpass equal to a SSHA 
password?  When I try setting it like this:

dnpass = {SSHA}VhxqnmwCLVQj7g3rQV+g9F3XnaJ6bRXR

in dovecot-ldap.conf

It still tries to do a simple bind and fails.  I get this error:

dovecot-auth: LDAP: ldap_simple_bind_s() failed \
(dn cn=authadmin,ou=people,dc=domain,dc=com): Invalid credentials

I'd prefer not to have the password for the authentication admin user 
stored in plain text in the conf file.

Thanks,
-jared