[Dovecot] Virtual users - what is better Maildir or mbox?

Kaya Saman kayasaman at gmail.com
Mon Jun 25 10:52:51 EEST 2012


On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 8:37 AM, Trever L. Adams
<trever at middleearth.sapphiresunday.org> wrote:
> On 06/25/2012 01:20 AM, Kaya Saman wrote:
>
> Now what I would like to know is, which is better for "virtual
> hosting" Maildir or mbox?
>
>
> Basically my requirement is that I would like to separate users via
> either individual folders and then put each user's mbox or Maildir in
> the created directory, or simply name each mbox or Maildir according
> to the user name.
>
>
> First up is this possible?
>
>
> Secondly, how would I go about doing it?
>
> Sorry, I missed this at first. It is quite simple. I don't store it in
> passwd or any other place, since you are doing vmail, you might find this
> easiest:
>
> in /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf (where mail_location is):
>
> mail_home = /home/vmail/%Ld/%Ln
> mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir
>
> in /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf (after paragraph “# System user and
> group used to access mails...”):
>
> mail_uid=vmail
> mail_gid=vmail
>
> Obviously, vmail may not be your user for vmail. Also, some of my notes may
> no longer be accurate for location, just find where it exists and edit.
>
> I hope this helps. Of course, this is a Maildir setup. mbox is probably very
> similar, but I have had too many mbox style mail queues go south losing all
> of the mail (or more than one would like), so I do Maildir, even though it
> isn't necessarily the best use of disk space.
>
> Trever
> --
> "I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them." -- Isaac Asimov

Thanks for the responses!

Sorry if I reply to every single one in this email however, I am using
Gmail's awful Web UI so I don't really have much control over what I'm
doing......


To start with the reason I'm not using LDAP is because I couldn't find
enough information on how to set it up! I did post here a couple of
times but got no responses...... so I figured it was something that
people either didn't know or found trivial.


I'll take a look at the above config for Maildir format as briefly
playing around with mbox it seems that folders on the / root (parent)
IMAP directory are stored separately. It may be better if everything
got stored under the Maildir heading.... I've previously **only** ever
worked with Maildir but I was told that there are some benefits to
mbox which is why I decided to try to use it here!

Regards,


Kaya


More information about the dovecot mailing list