[Dovecot] Virtual users - what is better Maildir or mbox?

[Kaya Saman]

Hi,

I'm trying to configure a server to use SAMBA and Winbind to
authenticate to Active Directory.... I managed to get this portion up
and running even the Dovecot portion.

For reference something similar to this guide:

http://www.whitneytechnologies.com/?p=119


However PAM is slightly different:


# cat /etc/pam.d/dovecot
auth        sufficient   pam_krb5.so no_user_check validate
account     sufficient   pam_permit.so


This is what my dovecot.conf file looks like:



# cat dovecot.conf
# v1.2+:
auth_use_winbind = yes

auth_winbind_helper_path = /usr/local/bin/ntlm_auth

protocols = imap

# It's nice to have separate log files for Dovecot. You could do this
# by changing syslog configuration also, but this is easier.
log_path = /var/log/dovecot.log
info_log_path = /var/log/dovecot-info.log

# Disable SSL for now.
ssl = no
disable_plaintext_auth = no

# We're using Maildir format
#mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir
mail_location = mbox:/mail:INBOX=/mail/%u


# Authentication configuration:
auth_verbose = yes
auth_debug = yes
auth_username_format = %n
auth_mechanisms = plain ntlm login
userdb {
  driver = static
#  args = uid=501 gid=1001 home=/mail/%u
  args = home=/mail/%u
  driver = static
}

passdb {
  driver = pam
  args = failure_show_msg=yes
}




Now what I would like to know is, which is better for "virtual
hosting" Maildir or mbox?


Basically my requirement is that I would like to separate users via
either individual folders and then put each user's mbox or Maildir in
the created directory, or simply name each mbox or Maildir according
to the user name.


First up is this possible?


Secondly, how would I go about doing it?

My users are not allowed to login to the system outside of IMAP as
it's a Mail only server.


Currently I've been looking at many links:

http://satish-linuxbug.blogspot.co.uk/2008/08/freebsd-with-active-directory-single.html

http://joseph.randomnetworks.com/2005/11/08/freebsd-users-and-groups-with-samba-winbind-and-active-directory/

http://wiki2.dovecot.org/HowTo/ActiveDirectoryNtlm

http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Authentication/Mechanisms/Winbind

http://wiki2.dovecot.org/TestInstallation

http://wiki2.dovecot.org/VirtualUsers

http://www.linuxmail.info/active-directory-dovecot-pam-authentication/

http://wiki2.dovecot.org/HowTo/SimpleVirtualInstall



I'm running dovecot version 2.1.7 on FreeBSD 8.2 x64 RELEASE.


The system is not being used as an MTA server meaning that only IMAP
transfers are being done using MS Outlook then filtered by
Thunderbird.



Regards,


Kaya