[Dovecot] installing dovecot on Mac OS X

[Alan Schmitt]

Hi,

I'm trying to install dovecot on Mac OS X, and I'm having trouble to 
make it run. If someone could point me to what I'm doing wrong or 
suggest some documentation to read, I'd be very glad (I've search the 
wiki for Mac OS X specific documentation, but could not find any).

I installed dovecot using darwinports. The version installed is 
0.99.10.5. (It's running well enough to tell me that when I do a:
sudo /opt/local/sbin/dovecot --version
;-)

Before trying to tweak the configuration file, I wanted first to get 
dovecot to run. When I first launched it, it told me that there was no 
dovecot user. After searching for a while, I finally found how to create 
one (and a dovecot group as well), doing the following:

sudo niutil -create / /groups/dovecot
sudo niutil -createprop / /groups/dovecot gid 300
sudo niutil -createprop / /groups/dovecot passwd '*'
sudo niutil -create / /users/dovecot             
sudo niutil -createprop / /users/dovecot uid 300   
sudo niutil -createprop / /users/dovecot gid 300
sudo niutil -createprop / /users/dovecot name dovecot
sudo niutil -createprop / /users/dovecot passwd '*'
sudo niutil -createprop / /users/dovecot _writers_passwd root 
sudo niutil -createprop / /users/dovecot change 0            
sudo niutil -createprop / /users/dovecot shell /dev/null
sudo niutil -createprop / /users/dovecot home /var/empty
sudo niutil -deleteprop / /users/dovecot realname   
sudo niutil -createprop / /users/dovecot realname 'Dovecot user'
sudo niutil -createprop / /users/dovecot expire 0

This seems to create the correct thing, and looking in NetInfo it looks 
like the other users and groups used for daemons.

I then launched dovecot and I got (trying to run it as a normal user, 
then as root):

top% /opt/local/sbin/dovecot                              
Fatal: fchown() failed for /opt/local/var/run/dovecot: Operation not permitted
top% sudo /opt/local/sbin/dovecot 
Warning: Corrected permissions for base directory /opt/local/var/run/dovecot
Warning: Corrected permissions for login directory /opt/local/var/run/dovecot/login
zsh: bus error  sudo /opt/local/sbin/dovecot

and it seems that this happens every time I try to launch dovecot.

Could someone point me at what I'm doing wrong?

The setting I'm aiming for is the following:
- being able to read local mail in maildir format using mutt
- being able to read local mail using Mail.app and IMAP access
- being able to use ssh to connect to the machine and locally run the 
  IMAP server (in order to synchronize mail maybe using isync.sf.net)

Thanks a lot,

Alan Schmitt

-- 
The hacker: someone who figured things out and made something cool happen.
.O.
..O
OOO
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