[Dovecot] LDAP, sieve, and virtual users

[Karl Latiss]

On Wed, 2006-05-24 at 14:04 -0700, Tracy R Reed wrote:
> This seems to be a common topic but I haven't seen anyone ask this exact 
> question and get a decent answer:
> 
> I use virtual mailboxes with all of the db's in LDAP. Last night I 
> upgraded to the latest CVS version of dovecot and dovecot-lda and got 
> global sieve filtering working by setting the global_script_path to a 
> sieve like /home/vmail/mydomain/sieve and it works great. Now I need to 
> figure out how to get per-user sieve filtering to work. I googled on 
> this and found:
> 
> http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2005-August/008568.html
> 
> How do I tell dovecot where the "virtual home directory" is? Yes, I 
> could use /home/vmail/mydomain/user as my virtual home directory  (that 
> is where I originally tried to put .dovecot.sieve but it did not seem to 
> work) but I don't see how I can tell dovecot about it. I see that in 
> deliver.c
> 
> #define SIEVE_SCRIPT_PATH "~/.dovecot.sieve"
> 
> we hard code SIEVE_SCRIPT_PATH with the home dir location. Am I going to 
> have to replace this with some code that generates an appropriate path 
> for my system or is there a better way?
> 
> And while I am here: Has any thought been given to being able to pull 
> sieve scripts from LDAP? At the moment sieve really does not buy me much 
> because the end users still do not have any way to edit their sieve 
> files on the server (no shells and can't code sieve's language) but it 
> would be nice if I could create a web interface somewhere which could 
> generate basic filters from templates and store their sieve filters in 
> LDAP so I didn't have to deal with somehow writing to files in their 
> virtual home dirs on the mail server. I have found old conversations 
> such as:
> 
> http://www.mhonarc.org/archive/html/ietf-mta-filters/1999-06/msg00000.html
> 
> but do not see where any standard way of doing this has come about. Or 
> really even any implementations at all of sieve stored in LDAP.

While I don't have a solution I can add  a "me too" to needing an answer
to this in the near future. I would expect that virtual hosting with
LDAP or sql backends and no shell is quite a common occurrence.

Karl.