[Dovecot] newbie questions

[Stewart Dean]

Thanks in advance for your patience and assistance.  Since a system 
administrator's work is most successful when nobody knows you've done 
anything....(ugly that...you get neither raises nor equipment funding as 
a result), I prefer to learn from other's experiences rather than fail 
in the same pits.

We are considering a switch from UW to Dovecot, since our users persist 
in using the INBOX as a file cabinet (maybe 25% use homedir folders) and 
we currently have, I think, .mbox INBOXes which are thus getting 
massively unmanageable and fragile.

Machine config: Running IBM AIX 5.2/5.3 on an F80 with 4GB memory (may 
be upgraded to 16GB), with IBM's sendmail binary at V8.11.6p2, hand 
compiled procmail at 3.22, 64-bit binary from C for AIX V6.0

Some questions I couldn't find answered in the docs:

1) Crispin of UW has a formats.txt file in which he lists and evaluates 
the various formats.  He calls the INBOX format type we use .unix (one 
big honking flat file).
Q1: Is this what is described in the Dovecot docs mail-storages.txt file 
as .mbox?

2) Authentication: The DC docs don't mention using NIS/yp for 
authentication, that I can find.
Q2: Does DC support NIS/yp authentication?
I guess I could periodically do a ypcat passwd to a file and point DC at 
it...

3) on IBM's AIX Unix...
Q3: Is there anyone out there running DC on AIX?  5.x or 4.3.3?  JFS or 
JFS2?

4) Inbox location/format:
= I will want to move from our legacy .mbox format to, I suppose, the DC 
default of Maildir++.
= I will want to do this in groups over time, rather than all at once, 
so both formats will have to work
= The legacy location of INBOXes has been /var/spool/mail/<userid>.  The 
docs appear to say that Maildir format INBOXes should be in ~/Maildir.
Q4:Can the INBOXes be in two location, the converted new Maildirs in ~, 
and the old unconverted in vsm?  Or will I have to override the DC 
cfg'ed INBOX location to be VSM until I get them all converted and then 
move them all to ~/Maildir and change the DC config to that?

5) Some mention was made of procmail configuration issues
Q5: Can procmail support both formats/locations, or will I have to put 
changes in the migrated users' procmailrc (what fun!)?

Again, thanks!
-- 
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Stewart Dean, Unix System Admin, Henderson Computer Resources
Center of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York  12504
sdean at bard.edu  voice: 845-758-7475, fax: 845-758-7035