[Dovecot] lda and home directory

[Rick Romero]

  Quoting Bob Miller <bob at computerisms.ca>:

> Hello,
>
> I am using qmail and lda configured such that lda should not have to do
> a lookup for delivery.  I set my defaultdelivery like so:
>
> |HOME=/home/mail/$USER /var/qmail/bin/preline
> -f /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/dovecot-lda
>
> Given that the email address being delivered to is
> bob.miller at computerisms.com, I expect $USER to be equal to bob.miller
> and $HOME to expand to /home/mail/bob.miller/.
>
> The problem is lda reports:
>
> Debug:_Home_dir_not_found:_/home/mail/bob.miller at computerisms.com/
>
> The whole system up to here uses only the bob.miller part, and I can't
> find where it keeps adding the domain part from.
>
> I have tried changing all sorts of variables and config values to try
> and make it quit adding the domain part, but no matter what I change lda
> still tries to deliver the email address as username.  The only measure
> of success I can report is that in some configurations mail delivers
> to /home/mail//.
>
> Where exactly is dovecot getting this value?
>
> Side question: I note in places throughout the wiki and internet
> variables such as $EXT, $USER, $DEST_USERNAME, and $FROM_ENVELOPE are
> used.  I can find no documentation, beyond my own common sense anyway,
> to explain how/when these variables are expanded, and what I do find
> doesn't seem consistent to me.  For example, on the CheckPassword page,
> $USER is implied to expand to Username, which could contain the domain
> or not.  However on the lda/qmail page, the variable shown is $EXT@
> $USER, which implies $USER will expand as only the domain part after the
> @ symbol and $EXT as everything before, yet changing the variable from
> $USER to $EXT in my defaultdelivery file has $HOME expand
> to /home/mail//.  Where do I find the story on how these variables (as
> opposed to the % variables) work?  (or more specifically, is there a
> $VAR I can use instead of $USER that will expand to just the part before
> the @?)
>
> --
> Computerisms
> Bob Miller
> 867-334-7117 / 867-633-3760http://computerisms.ca

Hi Bob,

I had/have the same issue.   In Dovecot 1.x I was able to use LDA with
vpopmail and only environment variables to deliver to a home directory.  I
was never able to get it to work with Dovecot 2.x - don't know if using
environment variables is depricated, but I ended up having to setup an auth
server to use lda with qmail/vpopmail.  :(

For your environment variable questions, those come from Qmail.  See:
http://www.lifewithqmail.org/lwq.html#environment-variables

Rick