silly quesiton

[John Stoffel]

steph> Up to now, I used PAM of each user in order to send and receive
steph> email. ( BTW, sending email, a use authentication was required
steph> and we used the login and passwd of the user on the system

So just to be clear, each user has a login on your mail server in
/etc/passwd?  If so, I would strongly urge you to move to using only
virtual users on your mail infrastructure.

steph> Now, for dovecot, I start to use MD5 passwrd.. and that sounds to be OK

steph> auth_mechanisms = plain login cram-md5
steph> passdb {
steph>   driver = passwd-file
steph>   # Path for passwd-file. Also set the default password scheme.
steph>   args = scheme=cram-md5 /etc/cram-md5.pwd
steph> }


steph> But changing the passwrd for the user1..  he can retrieve
steph> emails from dovecot, but cannot send anymore, because sending
steph> emails kept the old passwrd. ( using the PAM)

What is your mail software?  I assume you are having your users
connect to port 587 to submit emails to be sent out, correct?  If so,
are you using postfix, exim, sendmail or some other mailer to access
email submissions and then send them out?  If so, you should be able
to configure your mail server to use the same password file as your
new md5 password file. 

steph> 1) How can I says sendmail to use the same passwd file ( with MD5) than dovecot ?

Ah... just saw this.  And I don't know how to configure sendmail for
this.  I would suggest you look on the sendmail.org site for help.  

steph> 2) Ideally, I would like to create virtual users for the same
steph> mailbox  Is that possible ?

steph> like 2 files Users and PAsswrds pointing out the mailbox :
steph> maildir :/home/mailbox/user1 ex : user1 at foo.com  passwrd1 
steph> /home/mailbox/generic_mails and user2 passwrd2 
steph> home/mailbox/generic_mails

I do this myself using postfix and dovecot and it works well.  I have
my users defined in an sqlite3 DB, though for a small number of users
I think a flat file is simpler.

The trick is to have the dovecot and postfix/sendmail using the same
files for the virtual users and their passwords.  There are a number
of tutorials out there for doing this.

John