Hello. The first thing for me to say is thanks! I've been using dovecot since test 61 and it has basically performed flawlessly for me from day number 1. Dovecot makes me look like a genius sysadmin, especially compared to my colleagues struggling with exchange. So thanks, gracias, obrigado!!
I'm working on a configuration for 2.0 and I'm finding the documentation somewhat difficult. I think it would be very helpful to me to have encountered a single page that detailed all available configuration sections. I don't know how to find out what the sections are, when to use them or what specifically they control. So far I've encountered...
passdb plugin service protocol userdb local_name (and I think there is another one of these for ips)
The service section itself would benefit from a single page detailing all of the possible types of service sections available.
The next problem I've had is discovering that several parts of dovecot have no documentation at all even though they are standalone executables run by root. config, log, and ssl_params all run as root but there is also anvil and they look to me like they could support listening on a port if inet_interfaces is defined.
You can say, "Relax fella, trust me. These programs are all part of dovecot and are run only if they're needed." Then I'll say, "Yes but I'm the administrator. I need to know how the parts fit together to know if the system's broken." Then you say, "Well that makes sense, but the things you're talking about aren't really configured. They are mostly internal to dovecot, they just happen to be broken out into external programs. You may as well be asking for documentation on a specific function in a library. If that's what you want, you can read through the source code."
Well I guess that would be one solution. The bottom line is that it gives me an uncomfortableness to not be able to control or explain the operation of the software I'm supposedly administering. Take the program named log (which should be named dovecot-log or something less generic), it is launched even though I've specified syslog in the configuration. Logging is not interrupted when the process is killed. So, why is it running? What is it doing? Why does it need root? How do I control it? I think these are all good questions for an administrator to ask.
That's my feedback for what it's worth, but mostly, thanks again for dovecot!