Dovecot

Overview

Dovecot is email server software. Wikipedia 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

Notes

For Ubuntu 10.04 (whatever version of dovecot that corresponds to), some of the settings in dovecot.conf have been pushed out to sub-files. When dovecot is paired with Postfix, the files appear to be:

auth.d/01-dovecot-postfix.auth
conf.d/01-dovecot-postfix.conf

There doesn't seem to be any official documentation on how these files are invoked, but the last comment in this forum post implies that these files are read first and then may be overridden by /dovecot.conf (or possibly they are only loaded if the corresponding settings are missing, but this seems like a more fragile approach and so less likely).

Warning: Sometimes these files are totally not being looked at, and you have to paste their contents (...well, the auth.d/ one at least) into dovecot.conf. We really need to know what the mechanism is for loading these files.

If you are experiencing an error where dovecot complains that it can't find cmusieve – like this:

Fatal: Plugin cmusieve not found from directory /usr/lib/dovecot/modules/lda

– then edit the 01-dovecot-postfix.conf file and change "cmusieve" to "sieve". --Woozle 17:41, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

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??

Links

Reference