It doesn't matter if Dovecot's home directories are different from the users' primary home directories. It's probably even better if they're different. Yes, I thought so.

http://wiki.dovecot.org/VirtualUsers#homedirs should apply to your use case as well. Yes, I read that one. But I couldn't figure out from that how to set home with userdb ldap.

.., =home=/import/mail/%u/home Ah, using % Expansion works even if returned from an LDAP query? Great.

Is this <nothing>=<Dovecot Param>=<Value> form documented somewhere? I mean, is it documented that the LDAP Attribute is allowed to be empty?

Thanks.

.., =home=/import/mail/%u/home Unfortunately, the whole thing doesn't work. I'm using Postfix with mailbox_command set to dovecot's deliver. Now, Postfix seems to use nss to get the user's home dir and passes
this to mailbox_command as HOME. It looks like deliver prefers the environment variable over an LDAP
lookup: we have nss_override_attribute_value homeDirectory /tmp in nss_ldap.conf, and deliver uses /tmp as the home directory. The
only way it may get /tmp appears to be via nss, but we use userdb
ldap. So I think it's the value of HOME set by postfix that deliver
uses. Is there a way to override the environment? How would deliver behave
if I use something like env HOME= deliver ..., i.e. HOME is set, but empty?

If you're not giving -d parameter to deliver, it doesn't do userdb lookup at all. Ouch! I seem to be not only blind, but stupid, too. Of course, what should it look up otherwise!

However, I would still prefer an easier solution.

I just want deliver/Sieve. Sieve wants .dovecot.lda-dupes, therefore it wants a home dir. Since I use userdb ldap, I must fake a home dir in dovecot-ldap.conf. I must now even call deliver with -d.

Wouldn't it be much simpler to either -- make sieve (optionally) put .dovecot.lda-dupes in sieve_dir -- have a dovecot.conf home_dir parameter that, like mail_location, may be overridden by userdb?

See if this works:

plugin { home = /blah/%u } YES! Thanks!

Regarding your response time, sometimes I'm convinced that ,,Timo Sirainen'' is really a pseudonym for a group of some ten people operating in 12-hour shifts, half of whose keep hacking on dovecot around the clock while the other half keep answering stupid and non-stupid questions around the clock.