[Dovecot] Questions about differences to other mail servers

[Kai Schaetzl]

I just transferred over my first server from Suse Linux with 
uw-imap(ipop3/imap2003) to CentOS with Dovecot (0.99). I didn't find any 
problems in the testing phase, but when the actual transfer into 
production happened I found a few problems crop up:

1. Dovecot wants to chdir in the user's home directory even when logging 
in via POP3. However, the mailboxes for POP3 are all in /var/spool/mail. 
What's the reason for this and can I stop this?

2. In addition I found that the home directories need additional 
permissions I did not need when using ipop3/imap2003, although this imap 
server needs to write/read in the same directories as dovecot. 
Specifically, I had to change the permissions on the directory right above 
the pop user directories from 750 to 755. Those directories are owned by 
the user and the primary group he belongs to. It seems that dovecot 
somehow doesn't "use" the primary group of the user and so can't traverse 
thru and the chdir fails.

3. Furthermore, Dovecot created an IMAP directory structure within the 
home directory of most users like "mail/.imap/INBOX" (on some it reused 
the existing Mail -uppercase- directory). Just on a simple first POP3 
login. What's the reason for doing this? Maybe that user is never going to 
use IMAP? Does it test for both mail and Mail before it creates it's own 
structure or what does it do? I assume this is related to 
default_mail_env?

4. Dovecot supports "auth plain", does it also support "auth login"? If 
so, how do I enable it?

Kai

-- 
Kai Schätzl, Berlin, Germany
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