[Dovecot] mail_location backends

[Harrison Metzger]

Hello,

Where I work we have have an interesting setup, we have 2 machines with mail
accounts on them and both have dovecot. We would really like to centralize
all the mail accounts on one machine, but unfortunately the administration
has not approved it. However, if we could create the "illusion" that they
are on the same machine that would be acceptable. If we have a 3rd machine,
lets say called mail.example.com, could we install dovecot on it (using LDAP
authorization), such that when a user connects to this machine, it then
connects to one of the 2 other machines to retrieve their mail (instead of
reading from /var/spool/mail). So in essence, the mail backend is just
another POP or IMAP server. In the ldap directory we could have a field that
says the mail location is: "imap://machine1.example.com" for some users and
"imap://machine2.example.com" (Of course it dosent have to look like that,
but I hope you get my idea), then dovecot would make a connection to those
servers and read the user's mail. Does such a backend even exist? Can
dovecot's plugin support register a mail_location backend (such as
mbox:/blah/blah, ...)?

Harrison Metzger