[Dovecot] Confusion when trying to set up a first postfix+dovecot mailserver

[Hans J. Albertsson]

I find your answer a bit confusing:

I was showing these problems off as sources of confusion, not as 
examples of what I want to achieve!

My view of what a HowTo or a Tutorial is supposed to be is:

To the point: Explain what you are going to demonstrate, and explain to 
what extent it can or cannot serve as a boiler-plate for more advanced 
configs.
Complete ( in the appropriate manner ): For every single thing you 
display, explain what the reader is supposed to do about it, and make 
sure you explain what is going to appear automagically and what the 
reader must do to achieve what won't appear as a result of dovecot's own 
actions.
Do not point the reader to other docs unless those docs agree with the 
current one in both form and perspective. If they don't, copy in and 
adjust to fit the current doc.

Many of the "other docs" pointed to by the HowTos (and there appears to 
be no tutorials at all ) leave the uninitiated confused, because they 
appear to make slightly different assumptions from the referring doc.

Many docs say "you must first configure THIS,"
LMTP refers you back to the LDA config, and that may be absolutely 
correct, but me not being an initiate, I get lost. Because it seems that 
the perspective and the assumptions are slightly skewed or totally 
different, how can I tell at the first attempt?

I started out doing postfix config: that was easy, very easy, and I have 
set up several different ones now, none of which took more than an hour.
The first one was Chap 3 in Book Of Postfix by the German fellows, and 
that is just about the best tutorial I have ever seen. I did that w/o 
understanding the first thing about postfix vs sendmail,and it taught me 
a lot, and I could then read the rest of the book much faster.




On 2012-07-21 21:00, Thomas Leuxner wrote:
> Am 21.07.2012 um 16:49 schrieb Hans J. Albertsson:
>
>> location = maildir:/var/vmail/public:LAYOUT=fs:INDEX=~/public
> This namespace is defined for "public/shared" mailboxes<>  private mailboxes:
>
> See: http://wiki2.dovecot.org/SharedMailboxes/Public
>
> Basically something different from the setting you appear to be looking for.
>
>> User Home directory structure:/var/vmail/<domain>/<user>/
> This is indeed the structure used in this example. The mail location is set to:
>
> mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir
>
> In this configuration this translates to the actual location being read from the userdb (dynamically):
>
> […]
> args = username_format=%u /var/vmail/auth.d/%d/passwd
>
> [ file: /var/vmail/auth.d/<domain>/passwd ]
> <user>@<domain>:{SSHA}xxxx:5000:5000::/var/vmail/<domain>/<user>/...
> […]
>
> While this may not be the easiest configuration example to start with, it is a quite scalable and flexible approach though. You may find more background on this here:
>
> http://wiki2.dovecot.org/MailLocation
> http://wiki2.dovecot.org/UserDatabase
>
> Regards
> Thomas
>