[Dovecot] best choice of user database file to work with postfix?

[Phil Howard]

On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 7:12 AM, Rainer Frey <rainer.frey at inxmail.de> wrote:

> This is wrong. The auth service is not queried for recipient, only for
> valid
> SASL users (that connect to the submission service as *senders*). I'm
> talking
> about determining valid *recipients* for the virtual_mailbox_domains.
>

That's what I was (initially) talking about, too.  Of course, having a
submission service would be a good idea so out-of-office users don't have to
use some remote SMTP submission.  And that will have to be authenticated.  A
combination solution would be good.  But I definitely need to have the
recipient test done based on a common database of "mail users".

If the wiki can describe how to set up both, together, that is great.  If it
has to involve extracting usernames out of a file and running makemap in
Postfix to build a btree db file, that's OK, though I was checking to see if
there was a known way to avoid that.

If Postfix will reject incoming mail when Dovecot is not up, that's could be
bad, depending on how it's rejecting.  If it can validate from a file, then,
in theory, Postfix can queue and deliver safely later (and only users that
were deleted in the interim risk a separately mailed reject).

The ideal would be a complete mail server package that handled it all in one
... SMTP, submission, IMAP(S), POP3(S).  But what I've seen as attempts to
do that so far were less than promising (even though I have no need for what
most of the MTAs do).