[Dovecot] Dovecot on different server than MTA

[Geert Hendrickx]

Timo,

would you be interested in implementing an LMTP interface for deliver?

That would make Dovecot a stand-alone mailstore server, no local MTA
required.

	Geert

On Sun, Aug 19, 2007 at 11:31:53PM +0200, FORMER 03|Baltasar Cevc wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm setting up our new mail system using dovecot as mailbox server. As
> our goal is to have many many small redundant (virtual) servers as
> components, for example a mailhub (just relaying mail) and a frontend
> smtp server (just accepting or denying mail in the first place and
> then forwarding it to the mailhub), etc. I want to run Dovecot on a
> different server than the main MTAs. The mailbox server is the only
> service that cannot be made redundant in an easy way (the servers
> don't have common storage and we can't add that easily), thus I prefer
> not to have it on the same server as the relay.
> 
> Is there a best practice to do that? My current ideas are either to
> implement a stripped-down Postfix in the Dovecot server or to use some
> qpsmtpd setup there, both just to call the Dovecot delivery program.
> SMTP will be the communication protocol for the components except
> dovecot. (e.g. the virus scanner will be implemented as SMTP proxy).
> 
> I'm quite bad at ASCII art, but I'll try anyways to illustrate the
> setup:
> 
> I <--> [public incoming MX] -------------\
> N                                        |
> T                                       \|/
> E <--> [customer mailrelay] -----> [Postfix Mailhub] <====> virusscanner
> R                                    |   |
> N <-------outgoing mails-------------/   |
> E                                        |
> T <--> [dovecot mailstore] <-mail delivery
> 
> Each of the subsystems will be on a different virtual server in order
> to have small systems with distinct functions and to improve
> scalability. Everything except the dovecot server is planned to be
> duplicated on two different hardware machines (e.g. mx-in1 on server1,
> mx-in2 on server 2, mailhub1 on server1, mailhub2 on server2,
> virusscanner on server 2 and 3, etc. or something similar).
> 
> Thanx,
> Baltasar
> 
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