Re: IMAP server options in pkgsrc

[Martin Husemann <martin%duskware.de@localhost>]

On Fri, Aug 29, 2025 at 03:40:30PM +0100, Stephen Borrill wrote:
> (personally happy with Dovecot 2.3 for pop3, imap, lmtp and submission).

This is what I ended up with too: dovcot from pkgsrc and postfix from
base, plus postgrey from pkgsrc.

I threw away all the dovecot config and ended up with a 86 lines new
version, including comments (and no other files included).

In addition to the two users the pkg installed automatically I added a
vmail user (and group) as I went with virtual users. This means there
are no system users (no entries in /etc/master.passwd) for the mail
users, and vmail:vmail is the owner of all the state files ("home
dirs") and mail files (I use mdbox format).

The second user I added is doveauth, it is the user the auth and auth-worker
services run in, and all plain password files used must be readable by
this user (and only this).

Postfix uses this service to authenticate users on the submission port,
that part was a no-brainer (with no authentication possible on the SMTP
port).

In the end this all played nicely together, and in I spent most
time of my migration on the postfix configuration (which I thought I
would understand well). But the old config had grown over like 15 or
more years and dealt with some strange constructs, including a
relay_domain that I now got rid of.

I used mail/mb2md from pkgsrc to convert all old mails (stored in mbox
format on the old server) to temporary maildirs, and then imported
those with doveadm into the new setup.

The net result of all changes is nice and simple.
And it is easy to maintain and scalable now.

Martin