[Dovecot] Quick question...

[Michael Segel]

Thanks,

I was thinking of doing this in dovecot because I thought about having to
create virtual mailboxes 'on the fly' and then it would be nice to capture
the original mail for historical/auditing purposes.

There are two ways that I could do this. I could do this using a database
back end for the mailbox and then use an insert trigger, or I could do this
prior to the database using deliver to process the e-mail and then store it
in the database. (Instead of MySQL, I was looking at the IIUG's version of
IBM's Informix. Its free for some uses ;-)

Thanks for the quick response from everyone. 
I just needed a point in the right direction and I was too busy focused on
something else to RTFM. ;-)

-Mike


> -----Original Message-----
> From: tomas at tuxteam.de [mailto:tomas at tuxteam.de]
> Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2009 11:53 PM
> To: msegel at segel.com
> Cc: dovecot at dovecot.org
> Subject: Re: [Dovecot] Quick question...
> 
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> On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 02:28:50PM -0600, dovecot at segel.com wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Here's the scenario.
> >
> > I want to set up a mailbox so that when mail sent to the address is
> piped to
> > a processing application, instead of going to a mailbox.
> 
> Conceptually, when a mail arrives there are two processes involved: the
> mail transfer agent (MTA) and the mail delivery agent (MDA). The mail
> transfer agent takes the mail from "the net" (typically from another
> MTA) and decides whether the mail has to be delivered locally (then it
> passes it on to the MDA) or remotely (then it passes it on to another
> MTA).
> 
> Note that Dovecot doesn't enter this picture at all (yet). Its primary
> job is serving up mail to end-users when it has already been delivered.
> 
> All that said, most MTAs (Postfix, Exim, Sendmail, Qmail, you name it)
> bring along with them delivery functions (can fill in the role of MDAs).
> The dovecot distribution brings along with it a delivery agent (deliver)
> which you can configure to play many tricks on delivery via a language
> designed explicitly for that (called Sieve), and there are quite powerful
> "third party" delivery agents (e.g. procmail).
> 
> So, to sum up your best bet would be:
> 
>  - if the requirements are simple, like "pipe all mail going to this
>    user through this program", do as Justin said and tell your mail
>    transfer agent to do that. To be able to give you any hints, I should
>    at least know the beast by name ;-)
> 
>  - if the task is more complex (e.g. depending on other headers, time of
>    day, you name it), then just tell the MTA to push it to the MDA (most
>    come preconfigured to do that anyway, if circumstances are right) and
>    tweak the MDA configuration to achieve that.
> 
> Hope that helps. Things can be a bit confusing at the beginning.
> 
> Regards
> - -- tomás
> 
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