is pkg saying courier and postfix are incompatible?

Arthur Chance freebsd at qeng-ho.org
Fri Sep 19 07:25:38 UTC 2014


On 19/09/2014 07:44, Matthew Seaman wrote:
> On 19/09/2014 00:28, Dale Scott wrote:
>> I installed postfix-2.11.1_4,1 as a pkg and just noticed "pkg info
>> postfix" reports DOVECOT and OPENLDAP options are off. Do I need
>> these in my scenarios? I didn't put a ports tree on this system to
>> see if it was possible to build a system from packages only, but am
>> also not averse to recognizing it was pipe dream (and remember how to
>> use portmaster again).
>
> You can use postfix with dovecot without having to enable the DOVECOT
> option -- as I recall, that's something to do with postfix using the
> dovecot authentication mechanisms.

That's correct, it's to enable postfix to use dovecot's SASL interface 
to authorise users when postfix requires authorisation for mail 
submission. Much nicer to have one mechanism rather than two that might 
get out of sync. However, if authorisation is enforced via /etc/passwd 
or LDAP, you've already got your mechanism so don't need dovecot's.

> You only need OPENLDAP turned on for postfix if you want to use ldap
> lookups.  (Well Duh!) For a stand-alone system without many users, ldap
> is overkill, and you would generally be better off using lmdb or bdb
> files instead (I prefer lmdb -- seems simpler and to have fewer overheads).

And it's fast, if you have a lot of mail to process.

>> Is there anything special needed in Dovecot?
>
> No.  Either you configure postfix to use dovecot's delivery agent, or
> you make postfix speak LMTP to dovecot: from dovecot's perspective it
> doesn't need to know anything about or do anything differently depending
> on what MTA you're using.

LMTP has the advantage that postfix and dovecot can be in separate jails 
for extra security.



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