Postfix + Auth + SSL + pop3s/imaps

[BSD Mail]

Greetings,

I have a 5.3 Server. I'm planning to install Postfix.
I'm planning to use the Maildir format. 

I'm going to generate my own SSL certificates for mail
and use it for smpts/imaps/pop3s. But I'm not sure what
to use for authentication. I need to have the mail 
users/password seperated from the system user/password. 
Because some users will only have mail accounts and they 
won't have any shell access. 

I read about different auth mechanism and I know for sure that 
Plain Login is not what I want. I need DIGEST-MD5. I'm looking 
for something easier than SASL to configure. On my test server
I tried to configure SASL and couldn't get DIGEST-MD5 to work.
Any suggestion ?

Someone mentioned that I shouldn't worry about the authentication
if it's Plain or Login because I'm going to use SSL and that would 
encrypt both Login and the data channel. I'm not sure if this is 
100% true. Any idea ?

Last but not least, I'm going to add on top of all that a webmail.
probably Openwebmail or squirrelmail. Which one of them 
would work better with all what I mentioned earlier:

- Auth DIGEST-MD5
- Maildir
- SSL
- dovecot

I was checking one of squirrelmail password plugins and I read this sentence:
"Cyrus SASL includes a shell utility called "saslpasswd" for manipulating user 
passwords in the "sasldb" database. This patch attempts to use this utility to 
perform password manipulations required by your squirrelmail users without any 
administrative interaction. Unfortunately, this scheme requires that the 
"saslpasswd" utility be run as the "cyrus" user - a horrible security problem 
since we have chosen to SUID a small script which will allow this to happen."

I'm pretty confused about the authentication method to use. I'm trying to run 
everything as secure as possible. I configured Postfix to run chrooted. 
and I'm going to use SSL for sure. What auth should I choose for smtp ?

-- 
Regards,