[Dovecot] TECRA-A9 -- devcot LDA/sendmail

[dovecot at guice.ath.cx]

On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 10:10:54PM -0700, SM wrote:
> At 15:22 19-08-2008, dovecot at guice.ath.cx wrote:
> >Re: [Dovecot] TECRA-A9 -- devcot LDA/sendmai
> >
> >The mail is not delivered to the ~/Maildir; mail continues to get
> >delivered to /var/mail/<user-name>.
> >
> >First thing first, if you're reading this section/msg of the original 
> >thread,
> >please return to the initial/first message.  To the author (SM 
> ><sm at resistor.net>)
> >who offered the response about sendmails' local-host-names, how did
> >you arrive at this?  What does sendmails local-host-names have to do
> >with local delivery once the MTA accepts the mail <-- perhaps that's
> >a bit off-topic for this thread.
> 
> The MTA (sendmail) generally accepts the mail and then passes it to 
> the LDA if the recipient domain is listed in local-host-names or is 
> in class {w}.  In this case, the LDA used should be Dovecot's 
> deliver.  However, it won't work for local delivery, hence the 
> mailertable hack.
> 
> You mentioned that mail is being delivered but the steps at 
> http://wiki.dovecot.org/LDA/Sendmail don't work for you.  As you have 
> not provided any log extracts, I can only assume that sendmail is 
> calling the LDA defined by local MAILER to deliver mail to the 
> /var/mail/<user-name> mbox even though Dovecot's mail_location is set 
> to maildir:~/Maildir only.
> 
> Regards,
> -sm 

You are correct.  Allow me to provide just a little more detail.
We're assuming that dovecot.confs' 'Mail_location:' has nothing to do 
with the MTA handing off to the 'deliver' LDA.  With that being said, no
matter what the dovecot.confs' 'mail_location:' is set to, and with:

/usr/share/sendmail/cf/mailer/dovecot.m4 containing the following:

Mdovecot,   P=/usr/local/libexec/dovecot/deliver, F=DFMPhnu9,
                 S=EnvFromSMTP/HdrFromSMTP, R=EnvToSMTP/HdrFromSMTP,
                 T=DNS/RFC822/X-Unix,
                 A=deliver -d $u

in addition to hostname.mc containing:
MAILER(local)
MAILER(smtp)
MAILER(dovecot)

--or containing --

MAILER(smtp)
MAILER(dovecot)

the local mailer continues to handle and send the mail to
/var/mail/<user-name>. Yes we did create another hostname.cf. :=)

Here is a sample from our /var/log/maillog --

Aug 20 04:56:15 WORKSTATION sm-mta[3415]: m7K8uEAY003414:+to=<dovecot at guice.ath.cx>, delay=00:00:01, xdelay=00:00:01, mailer=local,+pri=34104, relay=local, dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent
Aug 20 05:02:02 WORKSTATION sm-mta[3441]: m7K921Ba003441:+from=<dovecot-bounces+dovecot=guice.ath.cx at dovecot.org>, size=8661, class=0,+nrcpts=1, msgid=<48ABEB0A.9020102 at bwin.org>, proto=ESMTP, daemon=IPv4,+relay=dovecot.org [82.118.211.50]
Aug 20 05:02:02 WORKSTATION sm-mta[3442]: m7K921Ba003441:+to=<dovecot at guice.ath.cx>, delay=00:00:00, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=local,pri=38892, relay=local, dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent