[Dovecot] Please help me resolve why mail isn't being delivered to virtual users

[Andrew Falanga]

Hi everybody,

There are a few things that I think I need to explain.  Far too many people
gave me feedback after my remarks about the dovecot wiki for me to answer
all individually.  At first, I must admit to some prideful need to lash back
for not being understood.  This however, would be totally inappropriate and
completely worthless.  Now, hopefully, I can articulate my thoughts without
sounding prideful and egotistical (very hard to do without the added benefit
of inflection when talking face to face).

My original statement that sparked this lengthy thread now was really born
out of nothing more than my observation of documentation after working five
years at HP as a programmer (not as an HP employee though).  I have seen,
even from my own efforts of writing more documentation than I care to admit
to, that inevitably there are things that become so common place to the
person writing the doc that they don't even realize they are fundamental to
understanding how things work.

Unfortunately, I used as an example, mbox and MAILDIR to make my point.
Perhaps this was a bad choice because I felt this same frustration in
reading other areas of the wiki.  It wasn't that the information was bad, or
unusable.  I just had questions about how it all fit together for dovecot,
and couldn't find the answers on the dovecot site.  I don't think it's
unreasonable to ask that a particular software program explain how it's
pieces fit together, or how it (the software program) is supposed to work
with other pieces it makes use of but doesn't directly control.

Now, here comes the other problem.  I was in a crunch.  The church e-mail
system had died, and a replacement was needed ASAP.  Originally, I should
have had more than adequate time to find my answers.  Normally, I do spend
much more time trying to find the answers myself.  (At this point, I can
only ask you to believe that.)  I learned a painful lesson in this several
years ago while learning OpenBSD.  I learned that I really did expect folks
to take me by the hand and walk me through.  It's something that I've worked
hard to overcome, and sometimes still struggle with.

I'm sorry that I reverted, to some degree, to this tendency with this whole
dovecot endeavor.

I do have more than a rudimentary understanding of how mail works.  After
all, I didn't ask everyone to explain IMAP, POP or SMTP to me.  Nor did I
ask for an explanation for SSL/TLS or other things.  Further, I didn't ask
any questions here for how to make sendmail do SMTP authentication.  Coming
into this, I knew that SMTP was the MTA, things like sendmail and postfix
did this, while other programs, e.g. dovecot; allow users to login and get
mail from the server.  An interesting thing for me to ask myself is, "Why
did I look up postfix on google, but not mbox?"  I didn't know what postfix
was and did look that up on Google.  When trying to get things working, I
was assuming that mbox and maildir was something dovecot implemented itself,
not a standard of sorts that dovecot implemented from a standards outline.
That's why I thought it strange dovecot didn't define what they did.
(Perhaps even why it didn't dawn on me to Google the term.)  I must also
mention that another respondent did give me a link in the dovecot wiki to an
explanation of mbox and so on.  I missed that one when doing my research.

In short, I'm sorry that I gave the impression that I assumed dovecot
developers and documentation writers should explain every little detail to
me.  I do not think this, nor was I trying to persuade others that I did
think this way.  My remark about a disclaimer was taken to an extreme I did
not intend.  I do think disclaimers on every page is excessive is
ridiculous.

In the future, I shall endeavor to look more heavily for the answers before
posting, or at least before assuming that no one on this list is willing to
help.  Thank you to all for the help given.

Andy

-- 
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is it such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?