Tom Hendrikx wrote:
On 27/09/11 17:51, terryjames9461@mm.st wrote:
Hello,
I'm moving my mail server from Exchange to an opensource one.
After a bunch of reading, I decided on building a Dovecot2 + Postfix server in a VirtualUsers-only + Multiple-domains configuration.
Since my messages will be stored by Dovecot, and the documentation is really good, I figured that it's smartest to configure Dovecot, then make Postfix 'fit' to it, sharing the data files that way.
I read through lots of the Dovecot wiki for v2.
There are many ways for storing the database data. My goal is to only have data in one instances, used by both Postfix& Dovecot.
I'm a little confused about: to do that sharing-in-one-place, do I have to use SQL or can I use the flatfiles like passwd-db? I think for sure someone already decided the best approach for this, and maybe I'm not understanding the logic to it.
The data I think I need to share are:
users (user@domain.com) passwords user aliases (mapping user2@domain.com -> user1@domain.com) domains domain aliases (domain.com also receives email for domain2.com)
And I think all of this can be in passwd-db in Dovecot. But I also want to make sure that Postfix ONLY accepts email for users/domains that exist, so it has to read that data too.
Can I do this that way with the flatfiles? Or do I have to use the SQL approach?
The problem with passwd(like) files is that they are almost never in the correct format to fit both daemons. The easiest way to use a database.
You could check out postfixadmin: it contains the database format you need, the documentation to hook postfix and dovecot into it, and a nice web gui for administrating the list of domains, aliases, mailboxes, passwords, etc etc. +1 one on PostfixAdmin. Wouldn't want to live without it. The main advantage of using a DB is that all information is stored in 1 location and available in the right format through SQL-queries. My 1st config used flat-files and the biggest issue was keeping the different files in sync (i.e. when creating/deleting users making sure to update all the necessary files).
My main concern was losing mails if the DB is unavailable but this isn't a problem; if the DB is unavailable Postfix will return a temporarily unavailable and the MTA should retry.
Rgds, N.