# Some help with dovecot



## Business_Woman (Jan 24, 2011)

Hello,

I installed dovecot a couple of weeks ago, but never got it to work. All thanks to a small typo in the password database. Things like that can
really ruin a whole day.

Anyways, there are still some things I am not sure about.

mail_location is set to '/home/%u/Maildir':INBOX=/var/mail/%u

I have created a group and a user for mail handling and assigned them to mail_uid and mail_gid respectively.

How what privileges should be assigned to mailuser and mailgroup? Should they have read/write permission in every users home?


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## Pushrod (Jan 24, 2011)

My approach is to have a separate hierarchy for all mail.

/home/mail/domain.com/user/

I use maildir format, and the dovecot UID has ownership over all files in /home/mail/. It's a lot better than dipping into people's home directories.

Also, inboxes are not stored in /var/mail with my setup, they are the root of the user's directory in the aforementioned hierarchy.


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## Business_Woman (Feb 6, 2011)

Hm,

How do you deal with the local mail delivery? I assume you have a user and a group for that?


I am a bit confused, everything is spaghetti...
My $MAIL is set to /var/mail/<user> but all my mail are delivered to 
/home/mail/<user>

Are the mboxes in /var/mail still necessary if you chose Maildir format?


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## Pushrod (Feb 7, 2011)

Delivery is done with a fixed UID for all accounts. 

/var/mail is empty on my mail server, and no mboxes are used (which is a good thing).


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