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

[Charles Marcus]

On 2012-07-21 5:24 AM, Hans J. Albertsson 
<hans.j.albertsson at branneriet.se> wrote:
> Also, Sorry if I sound like a whining kid: I am new to dovecot and
> postfix, but I was a software support engineer for Sun for ages, and I
> should really be able to manage this if I just had some consistent and
> non-confusing HowTo or Tutorial to follow as a first try.

1. Which 'HowTo' were you following?

2. If it wasn't the dovecot 'official' docs on the wiki, try those:

http://wiki2.dovecot.org/

$random_howtos on the internet is not the way to build a secure mail server.

Some of the wiki2 docs still have some v1 cruft in them, but for the 
most part they should be all you need (along with asking questions here 
for clarification), and it is a wiki - anything that you encounter that 
you find confusing or incomplete, by all means come here for 
clarification, and then update the wiki to help others who encounter the 
same issues as you.

You haven't even provided the most basic of details of the problem(s) 
you're having (like, for example, OS/platform, dovecot -n output, logs 
exhibiting the problem(s), etc...

First, take a step back, and start with one thing at a time (testing and 
making sure each step is working as expected before moving to the next 
one)...

1. install postfix, secure it, and get it delivering mail to at least 
one (test if desired) virtual domain/users maildirs using its built-in 
virtual delivery agent,

2. add dovecot into the mix to serve up the users mail,

3. switch to the dovecot delivery agent (I recommend LMTP, but at a 
minimum use the Dovecot LDA),

4. enable dovecot-sasl,

5. integrate dspam,

6. integrate mailman

Obviously, each step requires you to know how you want things to work - 
ie, do you want to provide POP+IMAP, or only IMAPS access, etc...

Last - to answer the one specific complaint that you had - dovecot will 
use all of those separate config files in the conf.d directory, or you 
can put all of your settings into one config file, the choice is yours - 
see the wiki for details:

http://wiki2.dovecot.org/BasicConfiguration

-- 

Best regards,

Charles