On Wed, 29 Aug 2007 12:31:01 -0700 (PDT) "WJCarpenter" bill-dovecot@carpenter.ORG wrote:
Also, are there any drawbacks of using exim to do the local delivery?
I'm very interested in the answer to this question, too. So far I have found (through reading, not trying things yet) that Dovecot's quota handling is more flexible than Exim's (exim is pretty much limited to FS quotas, I think, which is no good for virtual users). Dovecot's Sieve implementation has more features than Exim's. Both of these happen to matter to me (and led me to Dovecot in the first place.)
We use exim all the way to local delivery. And it handles Maildir++ quotas just fine. Depending on your actual needs and userdb/authdb choices the dovecot LDA might be the better choice. But exim can do pretty much everything one needs (we don't use sieve) and the advantages of indexing during delivery are negligible for us in general and potentially negative in some scenarios (mass mail to many/all users).
An upside for Exim doing the delivery is that you theoretically can arrange for some additional rejections to happen at SMTP time. Pragmatically, those additional rejections are typically not done at SMTP time anyhow (e.g., an explicit fail from a user Exim filter).
I don't think there are many situations where a MTA can do better than a LDA when it comes to rejections during SMTP time. Since at least with exim local delivery happens in a separate stage AFTER SMTP has been successfully completed.Now having consistent errors, logs and configurations for all mail delivery stages is something that might you want to stick with your MTA from the edge to the mailbox.
Regards,
Christian
Christian Balzer Network/Systems Engineer NOC chibi@gol.com Global OnLine Japan/Fusion Network Services http://www.gol.com/