[Dovecot] need help with dovecot-lda

[Ben Morrow]

At  5PM +0100 on 14/12/12 Andreas Meyer wrote:
> 
> Some month ago I upgraded our dovecot installation from version 1.0.5
> to version 2.1.7 without having any trouble. Postfix is delivering
> email directly per virtual transport to the maildirs and mailboxes of
> the users in /var/spool/vhosts/domains/....
> 
> Now I want to use dovecot-lda and created a new entry in the master.cf
> of postfix.
> 
> dovecot   unix  -       n       n       -       -       pipe
>   flags=DRhu user=vmail:vmail argv=/usr/libexec/dovecot/dovecot-lda -f
>   ${sender} -d ${recipient}
> 
> It is not clear to me, how the dovecot-lda is started bei dovecot and
> you it finds the socket dovecot postfix created.

The process listening on that 'dovecot' pipe is a Postfix pipe(8)
process. When a delivery request comes in from elsewhere in Postfix, it
invokes /usr/libexec/dovecot/dovecot-lda as a new child process. This
new lda process will contact the dovecot-auth service if it needs to,
but is otherwise not connected to the running Dovecot server at all.

If you want Dovecot to listen for deliveries (which has some efficiency
advantages), you want to use LMTP.

> I set soft_bounce = yes in main.cf of postfix and delivery of mail fails with
>  
> Dec 14 16:13:34 delta postfix/virtual[14082]: BBC0F1B31294:
> to=<xyz at anup.de>, relay=virtual, delay=395, delays=395/0.01/0/0.13,
> dsn=4.1.1, status=SOFTBOUNCE (unknown user: "xyz at anup.de")

What happens if you run

    echo "foo" | /usr/libexec/dovecot/dovecot-lda \
        -f xyz at anup.de -d xyz at anup.de

in the shell (as the vmail user)? Does it fail with exit code 67? This
is EX_NOUSER, and is the standard way for LDAs to signal 'I don't know
how to deliver to this user'. Either xyz at anup.de is not a valid address
at that domain, or you haven't made the auth-userdb socket available to
the vmail user. See http://wiki2.dovecot.org/LDA, under the section
'Virtual users'.

Ben