[Dovecot] related, but off-topic: how to allow users to change password?

[Eduardo M KALINOWSKI]

Sahil Tandon wrote:
> My dovecot is currently configured to authenticate vs. a userdb/passdb 
> passwd-file that contains, for each user:
>
> username:passhash:5000:5000::/path/to/home::userdb_mail=/path/to/maildir
>                                        
> Is it possible to let users authenticate and change their passwords?  There 
> are some webmail client add-ons that allow such things if users are system 
> accounts or in a MySQL/LDAP db.  Does anyone else use passdb/userdb 
> passwd-files like above and have a method for allowing users to change their 
> passwords from the web?
>
> Sorry for the slightly off-topic question, but hoping another Dovecot admin 
> has solved this problem.  Preference is to not to be tied to any particular 
> webmail client just for this change password feature.
>   

There isn't a general utility to do that. I wrote a simple script for
one such case, namely sork-passwd from the Horde suite. The script just
receives the username, old password and new password from stdin and then
changes the password entry in a file. But I'm using only passwd files,
without the extra fields in a userdb file. Besides that, there are other
things that could have been done in a better way.

If you want to take a look, I posted it here some time ago:
http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2008-June/031629.html

-- 
Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow.

Eduardo M KALINOWSKI
eduardo at kalinowski.com.br
http://move.to/hpkb