[Dovecot] Questions about differences to other mail servers

[Timo Sirainen]

On Mon, 2006-04-03 at 23:01 +0200, 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?

See bottom of http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailLocation

> 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.

Hmm. It should use it. If you used 1.0betas, you could check what
exactly it's using as gid by setting mail_debug=yes

> 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?

Although the directory is named .imap, it doesn't mean that it's
IMAP-specific. Perhaps I should have named it ".dovecot" instead. Index
files are stored there, and they can speed up accessing mails also for
POP3 users who keep the mails in the server.

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

1.0betas do.
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