thanx timo, u were right. i am confusing things.
vmail needs to exist as a unix user (nologin priveleges) not as a virtual user. just give ownership of the folders to vmail... since postfix LDA doesnt need to acccess the folders anymore...
right? will test dovecot lda and report back.
Ok. but its amazing that dovecot can deliver as vmail, a user who doesnt
exist.....how does it accomplish this?
Huh? Maybe you're confusing some concepts. Let's see..
vmail = UNIX user = typically in /etc/passwd. Postfix's pipe program looks up the UID number based on the UNIX username. Typically from /etc/passwd. Then it sets the deliver process's UNIX UID to this number.
Dovecot deliver then reads the config file and looks up the destination username from dovecot-auth. Depending on your configuration, it either receives vmail (which gets converted to UID) or the UID number directly. In any case it notices that the process's current UNIX UID is the same as the looked up UID, so it does nothing.
Destination username lookup is completely different from the UNIX UID, so there's no need to have a "vmail" user listed in Dovecot's passdb/userdb. It's never looked up from there.
[root@fwgw vmail]# ls -l
drwx------ 6 postfix postfix 4096 Feb 23 18:25 mesara.biz
Do i need to changes the permissions on the above?
Yes. Otherwise you'll get a permission denied error.
You could always just try and see what error messages Dovecot logs. It's really good at giving understandable error messages, especially the latest v1.1 version.