I recently upgraded from 2.3 to 2.4.1, a little unwillingly (thanks Fedora), and I've almost got 2.4.1 working on my failover mail server. The failover server's job is, if the main mail server is inaccessible, mail gets delivered to the failover instead. Then the main server will retrieve mail from the failover server when it can.

This has worked very well for many years. The way I implemented it was, I had two passdb's on the failover server: one for ordinary users who might need to access the failover server directly (login and password required), and one so that the main mail server could grab mail from the failover server (no password required). This broke when I went to 2.4.1; now, no matter what I do, Dovecot honors only one of the passdbs.

Here is the configuration as it stands now. The intention is that, if the user properly authenticates with the first passdb, they're authenticated and the second passdb isn't consulted. But if the user doesn't authenticate with the first passdb, Dovecot moves on to the second passdb.

the passdb for normal users to check their mail on the failover server

passdb passwd-file { passwd_file_path = /vmail/Maildir/passwdfile passdb_result_success = return-ok passdb_result_failure = continue-fail }

the passdb for the main server to grab mail from the failover server

passdb passwd-file { passwd_file_path = /vmail/Maildir/passwdfile passdb_skip = authenticated fields { nopassword = yes allow_nets = xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/32 } passdb_result_success = return-ok passdb_result_failure = return-fail }

As things stand now, Dovecot always moves on to the second passdb and authenticates the user, or not, according to the outcome of the second passdb. The outcome of the first passdb does not seem to matter.

Curiously, if I comment out the second passdb, the first passdb authenticates users as expected.

I've tried all kinds of gyrations with passdb_result_success and passdb_result_failure, and none of them seem to work. The options I have there right now are, to the best of my knowledge, the ones that best match the flow I want to be seeing.

There's a chance there's a bug in 2.4.1, but I bet I'm doing something wrong. What am I doing wrong?