Tuesday, February 22, 2022, 11:27:30 AM, [email protected] wrote: >> There doesn't appear to be a way to say "here is user and this is his >> email address". It seems to be assumed that user "Fred" will have an >> email >> address of "fred@..." and no way to override that.
> That is not how dovecot works. Dovecot goes "here is this authenticated user > and they are allowed to view mail in this inbox/directory". > You specify in config how someone is authenticated then you tell config the > path to the mbox or maildir/ that user can access. > Dovecot doesn't see email addresses, it just see's authenticated users. > Id doesn't care if you were authenticated by the username "[email protected]" > or "fredIsCool". > The email exist only in your mind, to dovecot it's just a string to match > with a password. > Mail doesn't "belong" to or is "owned" by an email address. > You can take mail files out of one maildir/ path and dump them into someone > else's maildir/ and now that 2nd person can access those emails. > In the config, you normally would say something like "[email protected]" has > access to "/var/spool/mail/domain.com/fred/" > Or "[email protected]" has access to "/home/fred/mail/" depending how you set > your system up. > You can just as easy say "fredIsCool" has access to > "/var/spool/mail/domain.com/fred/" > If you want to give fred someone else's mailbox you can say "[email protected]" > has access to "/var/spool/mail/domain.com/bob/" and next time fred logs in he > will see bob's emails. Just remember, the concept of email addresses is only > in your mind. Dovecot simply maps "authenticated user" to a directory of your > choice set in config. > Now if you just do the bare minimum of telling dovecot the path to the files > **IS** the name of authenticated user, then sure the path would obviously be > the same as the named used to login. > But you can get more complicated, for example using SQL, one column has the > username "fred" or "[email protected]" and another column can be the path to > his emails. Then you are not limited to the path having to match the > username. You might also be able to hard code names and paths in flat files > without having to setup a database. Thank you so much for that explanation. That separation is sort of what I expected originally. Don't know how/why I went down the path I did. Now I need to backtrack and see what I need to change. Thanks again, Phil
