Feedback on first, i.e. novice-level, experiences with dovecot

[Michael Felt]

a) google: "dovecot imap configuration" brought an article from 2005 as 
the first item:

while I like debian and a bit of history you may want to ask yourself 
how to improve your site as the primary hit from google. FYI: years ago 
I had great results in the top of google searches - and then I made a 
major error - I moved my site to a new url and google forgot me.

b) using your http://wiki.dovecot.org/QuickConfiguration as a guide:

I built dovecot using --prefix=/opt (I abhor /usr/local these days - 
that is so 1984ish). The applications got installed in /opt/bin

root at x066:/data/prj/aixtools/dovecot/core# ls -ltr /opt
total 36
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Nov 20 14:33 lib
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Nov 20 14:33 include
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 Nov 20 14:33 share
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Nov 20 14:33 libexec
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 20 14:33 sbin
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 20 14:33 bin

Are the directories 'make install' touched or made.

root at x066:/data/prj/aixtools/dovecot/core#  /opt/bin/doveconf -n

# 2.3.devel (92c8109): /opt/etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf
doveconf: Fatal: open(/opt/etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf) failed: No such 
file or directory

where are example configs?

root at x066:/data/prj/aixtools/dovecot/core# find /opt -name example-config
root at x066:/data/prj/aixtools/dovecot/core#

Not in /opt

How about a default config?

root at x066:/data/prj/aixtools/dovecot/core# find / -name dovecot
/etc/init.d/dovecot
/etc/pam.d/dovecot
/etc/default/dovecot
/etc/dovecot
/var/lib/dovecot
^C

Seems to be /etc/dovecot

root at x066:/data/prj/aixtools/dovecot/core# ls -l /etc/dovecot
total 40
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root    4096 Apr 30  2015 conf.d
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    4180 Jun  8  2014 dovecot.conf
-rw-r----- 1 root dovecot  410 Jun  8  2014 dovecot-db.conf.ext
-rw-r----- 1 root dovecot  782 Jun  8  2014 dovecot-dict-sql.conf.ext
-rw-r--r-- 1 root dovecot 1363 Apr 30  2015 dovecot.pem
-rw-r----- 1 root dovecot 5348 Jun  8  2014 dovecot-sql.conf.ext
drwx------ 2 root root    4096 Apr 30  2015 private
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root     121 Jun  8  2014 README

and finally - read README to find the examples:

root at x066:/data/prj/aixtools/dovecot/core# cat /etc/dovecot/README
Configuration files go to this directory. See example configuration files in
/usr/share/doc/dovecot-core/example-config/

Conclusion:

--prefix=/opt is not applied everywhere.

* More first impressions as I come to them - if you want them - as I 
hope this helps make dovecot better!

Michael