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

[Gábor Lénárt]

On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 01:45:35PM -0400, Phil Howard wrote:
> > Then I think MySQL will do the job. Both postfix and dovecot support MySQL,
> > and you can use SASL to authenticate SMTP with Dovecot, so Dovecot would do
> > all the auth work. Finally, you could use Postfix's VDA patch if you want to
> > use Maildir++.
> >
> > Hope this helps.
> >
> 
> I don't want to use any other server engine of any kind with this.  I'm
> trying to keep it small and lean, and minimize what the people that have to
> monitor and fix it need to know.  So at the present time, I am excluding all
> databases like any SQL or LDAP or anything else that needs to run as a
> daemon/engine/service.

Aham, yes, but as soon as you need some management interface, like a web
based one, it will be more and more complicated to deal with this decision,
you must edit/generate those files with that interface, care about locking
because of the possibility of multiple admin access at the same time, you
must parse them when you want to show the user list and so on. Sure, if you
are very sure that it's not a need and it won't be either, then maybe you're
right about "keeping minimal" solution, but based on my experience at an
ISP, it's always the situation that sooner or later somebody want to extend
the usage of a system which sooner or later needs to use some kind of
database to avoid the complexity with dealing local "databases" as flat
files or other solution (or keeping them as "system users").