Thank you for your help, Aki!

It turns out my passwd file was in the wrong format and that was causing the errors.

I'll investigate into this a bit more.

-- Aaron Lin jrmu@ircnow.org IRCNow (https://ircnow.org)

On Mon, Aug 04, 2025 at 07:50:54AM +0300, Aki Tuomi wrote:

...

On 04/08/2025 01:30 EEST jrmu--- via dovecot <dovecot@dovecot.org> wrote:

Greetings Dovecot team/users,

I am trying to use Dovecot to serve Maildir files. The users' email is located in ~/Maildir (in each user's home directory). I tried specifying

mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir

but I get this error:

Aug 4 00:06:34 ch dovecot: imap(username): Error: Relative home directory paths not supported: 0

Are relative home directory paths not supported?

Here is the output of dovecot -n:

dovecot -n

driver = passwd-file } verbose_ssl = yes

1375 bytes received in 0.00 seconds (5.18 MB/s)

-- Aaron Lin jrmu@ircnow.org IRCNow (https://ircnow.org)

---

dovecot mailing list -- dovecot@dovecot.org To unsubscribe send an email to dovecot-leave@dovecot.org

Either add

mail_home = /path/to/home/%u (or something like this)

or your passwd-file needs to returns home directory.

Aki

I was able to solve this by specifying userdb use the passwd-file in addition to passdb using bsdauth:

userdb { args = username_format=%u /etc/passwd default_fields = quota_rule=*:storage=1G driver = passwd-file }

This is combined with:

passdb { driver = bsdauth }

This may be an ugly solution but it does seem to work and only requires me maintain a single passwd file.

-- Aaron Lin jrmu@ircnow.org IRCNow (https://ircnow.org)

On Mon, Aug 04, 2025 at 07:32:55PM -0700, jrmu@ircnow.org wrote:

I am now trying to use bsdauth instead of passwd-file:

passdb { driver = bsdauth }

When I attempt to login via IMAP, dovecot reports this error:

Aug 4 19:19:43 jrmu dovecot: imap(77561): Error: Couldn't drop privileges: User is missing UID (see mail_uid setting)

Below is the output of dovecot -n:

dovecot -n

2.3.21.1 (d492236fa0): /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf

OS: OpenBSD 7.7 amd64 ffs

Hostname: jrmu.host.nastycode.com

auth_debug = yes auth_debug_passwords = yes auth_verbose = yes auth_verbose_passwords = sha1 first_valid_uid = 1000 listen = 104.167.242.227, 2602:fccf:1:2227:: mail_debug = yes mail_location = maildir:/home/%u/Maildir mbox_write_locks = fcntl mmap_disable = yes namespace inbox { inbox = yes location = mailbox Drafts { special_use = \Drafts } mailbox Junk { special_use = \Junk } mailbox Sent { special_use = \Sent } mailbox "Sent Messages" { special_use = \Sent } mailbox Trash { special_use = \Trash } prefix = } passdb { driver = bsdauth } ssl_cert = </etc/ssl/jrmu.host.nastycode.com.crt ssl_key = # hidden, use -P to show it verbose_ssl = yes

dovecot will properly drop privileges work if I hard code mail_uid and mail_gid:

mail_uid = 1001 mail_gid = 1001

But shouldn't dovecot be allowed to drop to any user that logs in, and not get hard coded to a single uid?

-- Aaron Lin jrmu@ircnow.org IRCNow (https://ircnow.org)

On Mon, Aug 04, 2025 at 07:50:54AM +0300, Aki Tuomi wrote:

...

...

On 04/08/2025 01:30 EEST jrmu--- via dovecot <dovecot@dovecot.org> wrote:

Greetings Dovecot team/users,

I am trying to use Dovecot to serve Maildir files. The users' email is located in ~/Maildir (in each user's home directory). I tried specifying

mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir

but I get this error:

Aug 4 00:06:34 ch dovecot: imap(username): Error: Relative home directory paths not supported: 0

Are relative home directory paths not supported?

Here is the output of dovecot -n:

dovecot -n

driver = passwd-file } verbose_ssl = yes

1375 bytes received in 0.00 seconds (5.18 MB/s)

-- Aaron Lin jrmu@ircnow.org IRCNow (https://ircnow.org)

---

dovecot mailing list -- dovecot@dovecot.org To unsubscribe send an email to dovecot-leave@dovecot.org

Either add

mail_home = /path/to/home/%u (or something like this)

or your passwd-file needs to returns home directory.

Aki