Thank you. I like that suggestion. I will probably do that.

Any recommendation on moving the mail over from the old location to the new location without messing up any of the date/time stamps on the messages? I use maildir format.

On 4/17/2009 8:41 AM, Romer Ventura wrote:

Looks about right... I have a very similar setup, but i authenticate to Active Directory via LDAP and it works very good.

If you have or may get more domains i would set up mail_location to something like this: /home/vmail/%d/%u that way you are ready for growth and everything is kept organized by domains. Just a thought.

On Apr 17, 2009, at 10:14 AM, Jeff Grossman wrote:

...

I really want to try and get this plus addressing working correctly with Dovecot and Postfix. After doing some reading I think I am going to change my Postfix setup from mailbox_command to mailbox_transport. I have a few questions to make sure I am thinking correctly. All of my users are system users. Their mail is delivered directly to their "/home/<user>/Maildir" directory.
Everything works great and I have no problems. Here is what I am thinking of doing.

1. Create a new vmail user and group.
2. Have all mail delivered for each user to the "/home/vmail/<user>/" directory. All mail will be owned by vmail, but that is okay since Dovecot is the only thing touching the mail files anyway.
3. Change the mail_location setting in dovecot.conf to "mail_location = /home/vmail/%u
4. Uncomment the auth_socket_path = /var/run/dovecot/auth-master setting in dovecot.conf
5. Switch Postfix's main.cf to use "mailbox_transport = dovecot" and put the following line in master.cf:
   1. dovecot unix - n n - - pipe flags=DR user=vmail:vmail argv=/usr/local/libexec/dovecot/deliver -f ${sender} -d ${recipient} -n -m ${extension}
6. Copy the current users mail to the new vmail location. What is the best way to copy it preserving date and time stamps on the mail?

Did I cover all of the steps are am I missing something? Here is a copy of my current dovecot -n output. Thanks for any help you can offer me.

# 1.2.rc3: /usr/local/etc/dovecot.conf # OS: Linux 2.6.29-1-amd64 x86_64 Debian squeeze/sid base_dir: /var/run/dovecot/ protocols: imap imaps pop3 pop3s ssl_cert_file: /etc/ssl/certs/ssl.crt ssl_key_file: /etc/ssl/private/ssl.key ssl_cipher_list: ALL:!LOW:!SSLv2 disable_plaintext_auth: no login_dir: /var/run/dovecot//login login_executable(default): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap-login login_executable(imap): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap-login login_executable(pop3): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/pop3-login mail_location: maildir:~/Maildir mail_executable(default): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap mail_executable(imap): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap mail_executable(pop3): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/pop3 mail_plugin_dir(default): /usr/local/lib/dovecot/imap mail_plugin_dir(imap): /usr/local/lib/dovecot/imap mail_plugin_dir(pop3): /usr/local/lib/dovecot/pop3 auth default: mechanisms: plain login passdb: driver: pam userdb: driver: passwd plugin: sieve: sieve

On 4/17/2009 8:46 AM, Timo Sirainen wrote:

On Apr 17, 2009, at 11:14 AM, Jeff Grossman wrote:

...

2. Have all mail delivered for each user to the "/home/vmail/<user>/" directory. All mail will be owned by vmail, but that is okay since Dovecot is the only thing touching the mail files anyway. ..
3. Copy the current users mail to the new vmail location. What is the best way to copy it preserving date and time stamps on the mail?

cp -a

...

userdb: driver: passwd

You'll probably want to use userdb static now. Or if deliver needs to verify that the user exists, use something like:

userdb passwd { args = uid=vmail gid=vmail home=/home/vmail/user/ }

I don't know if deliver would need to know if the user exists. If I decide to go with the example above, would the home directory be /home/vmail/%u or would it be as you entered above?

Also, when I do the cp -a command to copy the mail over, I also need to change all ownership to vmail:vmail, correct?

Thanks for all of your help with this.

Jeff

On 4/17/2009 9:24 AM, Timo Sirainen wrote:

On Fri, 2009-04-17 at 09:10 -0700, Jeff Grossman wrote:

...

...

You'll probably want to use userdb static now. Or if deliver needs to verify that the user exists, use something like:

userdb passwd { args = uid=vmail gid=vmail home=/home/vmail/user/ }

I don't know if deliver would need to know if the user exists. If I decide to go with the example above, would the home directory be /home/vmail/%u or would it be as you entered above?

Oh, sorry, /home/vmail/%u of course.

...

Also, when I do the cp -a command to copy the mail over, I also need to change all ownership to vmail:vmail, correct?

Right.

Great. Thank you for your help. I think I might try and tackle this in a little bit.

Jeff

On 4/17/2009 12:39 PM, Jeff Grossman wrote:

...

I really want to try and get this plus addressing working correctly with Dovecot and Postfix. After doing some reading I think I am going to change my Postfix setup from mailbox_command to mailbox_transport. I have a few questions to make sure I am thinking correctly. All of my users are system users. Their mail is delivered directly to their "/home/<user>/Maildir" directory.
Everything works great and I have no problems. Here is what I am thinking of doing.

1. Create a new vmail user and group.
2. Have all mail delivered for each user to the "/home/vmail/<user>/" directory. All mail will be owned by vmail, but that is okay since Dovecot is the only thing touching the mail files anyway.
3. Change the mail_location setting in dovecot.conf to "mail_location = /home/vmail/%u
4. Uncomment the auth_socket_path = /var/run/dovecot/auth-master setting in dovecot.conf
5. Switch Postfix's main.cf to use "mailbox_transport = dovecot" and put the following line in master.cf:
   1. dovecot unix - n n - - pipe flags=DR user=vmail:vmail argv=/usr/local/libexec/dovecot/deliver -f ${sender} -d ${recipient} -n -m ${extension}
6. Copy the current users mail to the new vmail location. What is the best way to copy it preserving date and time stamps on the mail?

Did I cover all of the steps are am I missing something? Here is a copy of my current dovecot -n output. Thanks for any help you can offer me. Okay, I made the change to using mailbox_transport instead of mailbox_command in Postfix. I followed the above steps only having to change one thing. Line 5.1 was wrong. I needed it to say "-d ${user}" instead of recipient. It was looking for user@domain instead of just user which is was exists in my userdb file. I decided against

On 4/17/2009 8:14 AM, Jeff Grossman wrote: putting everything in "/home/vmail/domain/user" because when I would log in via IMAP it didn't know my domain name. I am assuming that is once again because my userdb only has user names and not domains.
Just I just went with "/home/vmail/user" and it is working. I don't think I will be using more than one domain, so it should be fine.

Thanks for everybody's help with this. Rather painless. The only problem I had was with the user name but I got it resolved.

Jeff I have come across my more problem. If somebody sends mail to JEFF instead of jeff it is saying user unknown. How do I tell the pipe command in Postfix to lowercase the username but not the extension?

Thanks, Jeff

On 4/17/2009 1:43 PM, Timo Sirainen wrote:

On Fri, 2009-04-17 at 13:05 -0700, Jeff Grossman wrote:

...

I have come across my more problem. If somebody sends mail to JEFF instead of jeff it is saying user unknown. How do I tell the pipe command in Postfix to lowercase the username but not the extension?

You can also do this in Dovecot. For example auth_username_format=%Lu

I just found that parameter. I just set it and restarted Dovecot.
Going to test it right now.

Thanks.