dovecot-lda without starting dovecot?

Hello,

we have a setup where SMTP/LDA and POP3/IMAP are on different physical hosts. They share the mail data via an external storage. Now we would like to use dovecot-lda on the smtp host, so we wonder if the lda binary works without starting dovecot from init. As there will be no POP3/IMAP usage on this host it seems unnecessary. Nevertheless we cannot judge if it is still needed for lda&sieve to work. Your opinion?

-- Regards, Stephan