[Dovecot] deliver LDA and INBOX location

David Lee t.d.lee at durham.ac.uk
Thu Aug 31 21:01:31 EEST 2006


(OS: Fedora Core 5;  dovecot: 1.0 rc7)

On a typical UNIX-like OS, the INBOXes are in "/var/spool/mail/" using the
user identifier: so user 'fred' has INBOX "/var/spool/mail/fred".

We have a well-established different convention which subdivides this,
based on the last two digits of the uid: "/var/spool/mail/12/fred" (for
fred's uid as something ending "[...]12").  This is working nicely with
dovecot, using the new rc7 functionality:
  default_mail_env = mbox:%h:INBOX=/var/spool/mail/%-2.02i/%u:[...]

I am now trying to get sendmail to use dovecot's "deliver" as the LDA,
(following "http://wiki.dovecot.org/LDA") as a simple drop-in replacement
for the normal LDA.  (Actually our migration starting point is a UW-IMAP
background using its 'tmail' as LDA.)

1. It seems that using "auth default {...socket listen {...}...}" is
mandatory.  Can someone confirm?  This feels like an extra complication:
is it strictly necessary in a NIS/PAM set-up?  (Fair enough if so.)

2. The main problem is that, according to the log file, the delivery
attempt is being made to an INBOX "/var/spool/mail//fred".  That is, it
seems to be ignoring the "default_mail_env" setting.

Have I missed something in the wiki, or is this a bug of some sort?


-- 

:  David Lee                                I.T. Service          :
:  Senior Systems Programmer                Computer Centre       :
:                                           Durham University     :
:  http://www.dur.ac.uk/t.d.lee/            South Road            :
:                                           Durham DH1 3LE        :
:  Phone: +44 191 334 2752                  U.K.                  :


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