On 11/7/25 12:20, Antonio Oliveira via dovecot wrote:
Hi, I'm using dovecot-2.3.21.1 on fedora42. It seems that increasingly remote clients are only supporting the full email address as the login ID instead of just the username. One such example is Apollo.io, an AI sales platform that uses IMAP to connect to a remote server to send and receive emails. The documentation I've found on this appears to be deprecated or incomplete. Do I want to look for "shared namespace" documentation? Currently, emails are stored in /var/spool/mail/username. Does this need to change to something like /var/spool/[1]domain.com/username?
We've been using full-address logins here for 20yrs or so. We use / var/mail/<domain>/<uname> for mail storage. No shared namespace stuff. We use MySQL-based authentication. It's all very easy to set up.
If you are serving a single domain (or multiple domains that ultimately deliver to the same mailbox, for example [myuser@domain1.com] (mailto:myuser@domain1.com) and [myuser@domain2.com] (mailto:myuser@domain2.com) both going to myuser), you don’t need to store mailboxes under /var/spool/<domain>/myuser. You can simply keep them in /var/spool/mail/myuser.
We need to use the domain as a path component here to avoid username namespace collisions, as we are serving many domains. The OP wouldn't necessarily need that if he's handling one domain, as you observed, but it's not a bad idea.
-Dave-- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA