[Dovecot] Questions about differences to other mail servers

[Curtis Maloney]

Kai Schaetzl wrote:
> 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?
> 

I remember this bug... I'm sure it was fixed.  Which version of the 
ancient-but-venerable 0.99 are they shipping with CentOS?

> 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.

Check in the config file which users Dovecot is set to use.  It may be that you 
need to chown the dir, or set Dovecot to use a different user.  NOTE: There's 
more than one use setting in Dovecot, because of security and the auth daemon.

> 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?

Most likely, yes.  What do you have default_mail_env set to?  If you haven't set 
it, Dovecot will try to auto-detect.

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

Does 0.99 support this?  Honestly, even though I still use 0.99, new installs 
should be using the latest 1.0 release ( currently 1.0beta4)

--
Curtis Maloney
cmaloney at cardgate.net