[Dovecot] Why is dovecot involved in my smtp process

[Adam Szpakowski]

On 23.02.2012 16:16, Steve Campbell wrote:
> I've been trying to get smtp auth set up for days. All my sendmail and 
> sasl2 stuff seems to be proper, but the user can't use the system on 
> port 587, which is where I require authorization.
>
> Now I see where messages are in my maillog of the type:
>
> auth: pam_unix(dovecot:auth) : authentication failure ........
>
> Why is dovecot involved in my smtp processes and how do I fix this. 
> I've got some very mad users. The 10-auth.conf file is pretty much 
> stock except for allowing plain text logins.
Dovecot can be used as authentication source. It has its own 
implementation of SASL library which can be used instead of Cyrus SASL 
implementation.

In Dovecot2 the config for auth is in 10-master.conf, service "auth".

Please see:
for dovecot 1.x: http://wiki.dovecot.org/Sasl
for dovecot 2.x: http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Sasl

on the postfix side: http://www.postfix.org/SASL_README.html#server_dovecot

-- 
Adam Szpakowski