Dovecot

About
Dovecot is email server software. describes it as just a POP3 and IMAP server, but Ubuntu packages it as a "stack" which provides both MTA and MDA functionality.

Helper Binaries
Dovecot includes a number of helper command-line binaries; existing documentation for these is hard to find. Typical locations for these commands are:
 * /usr/lib/dovecot/
 * used by Ubuntu
 * /usr/libexec/dovecot/
 * /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/

Binaries include:
 * /deliver: can be used by Postfix when delivering mail to user mailboxes

SASL
SASL stands for Simple Authentication and Security Layer.
 * Postfix and Dovecot SASL (Dovecot wiki)

SSL
See Secure Sockets Layer for related information.
 * Dovecot SSL
 * Dovecot SSL configuration

None of the documentation seems to mention the fact that many of these settings are in sub-files (see, below), and your changes to dovecot.conf will be ignored if they are overridden in one of these files -- so edit that file instead.
 * In theory, you should be able to create your own subfile and add these settings to it; I have not tested this. --Woozle 14:08, 11 December 2010 (EST)
 * In the server I just configured, the SSL settings were in "conf.d/01-dovecot-postfix.conf". Tentatively: ssl_cert_file should be set to the certificate you receive from the certificate signer (e.g. OptimumSSL), and ssl_key_file should be set to the private key you generated earlier (when you also generated the CSR). --Woozle 14:08, 11 December 2010 (EST)
 * This year, ssl_cert_file was the certificate as sent via email (2 certificates with some text between them); ssl_key_file was the key file I newly generated for the CSR for this certificate. (Possibly I could have re-used the one from last year, but I couldn't see any advantage to that, and I wasn't sure if it would even work.) Although explanations elsewhere might make you think that ssl_cert_file would need to be the server certificate plus the intermediate file, the intermediate file contained at least 2 or 3 certificates and ssl_cert_file only contained 2, one of which was the server certificate. So either some of those intermediate certificates are unnecessary or else I don't understand how this file works. --Woozle 18:01, 17 February 2011 (EST)

Sample Configurations

 * Woozle:
 * dovecot.conf
 * auth.d/01-dovecot-postfix.auth

Theories
" auth default { socket listen { master { path = filespec" creates the socket (or provides the service, or however you want to describe it); a different part of dovecot tries to access that socket by default unless you override it with " auth external { socket connect { master { path = filespec". Where is this documented??

Reference

 * official site
 * wiki
 * wiki