[Dovecot] What best decision to make for flatfiles or SQL when I use Dovecot2 + Postfix together?

[Patrick Domack]

Depends on how you think about it.

If you forget about email addresses. Dovecot works on mailbox's, and  
it maps a mailbox to a path, username, and password.

In postfix, it only cares about email addresses (if you use dovecot  
for delivery, if not then postfix also has to care about the mailbox  
location). In this case you just tell postfix the email addresses that  
are valid, and what mailbox they go to.

So normally most users would just have a 1 to 1 mapping in postfix,  
email -> email, as their email address will be the same as their  
mailbox. But then you might have extra, like, sales at x -> user at x

All depends on how flexable or simple you want it later. You could  
just manage two flatfiles. Or you could have it create the 1 to 1  
mapping automatically with a script, and just do the extra mappings  
seperate. Or do the whole thing in sql, and use like postfixadmin to  
manage it all. Or even use postfixadmin, and have a script pull the  
results into flatfiles that it uses.

It all depends on how much time and energy you want to spend in  
setting it up, vs the flexibility you in vision you need later.

I do it 3 different ways, on different systems, one is just sql fully,  
nothing interesting. My personal email is sql, but dumped to local  
flatfiles. And another system I pull the info from windows AD.


Quoting terryjames9461 at mm.st:

> Hello Patrick,
>
> On Tuesday, September 27, 2011 6:06 PM, "Patrick Domack"
> <patrickdk at patrickdk.com> wrote:
>> Using dovecot lda/lmtp you remove all postfix needs to know mailbox
>> name to directory mapping, that would be duplicated.
>
> With using the Dovecot lmtp option, where does Postfix know to refuse
> email for a non-existing user or domain?  That also has to be shared?
>
> I am trying to draw a picture in my head of all the data pieces.  Are
> you saying that when using lmtp the data for Postfix and the data for
> Dovecot/LMTP do not overlap anymore?  Each can have its own flatfiles?
>
>
> TJ