Hi,

recently I was in a process of modifying my mail server setup, and after a lot of thought ended up using maildrop as a MDA in a Postfix/Dovecot mail server combo. I decided to use Dovecot because I needed smtp authentication in Postfix and for me it was much easier to use its sasl implementation with Postfix. Anyway, to cut the long story short, only thing that was missing from this picture was the fact that maildrop couldn't perform user lookups against a user database that was being served by Dovecot in order to easily determinate proper mailbox location and home directory of my "virtual" users. I know that I probably could have configured Courier Authlib to authenticate against the same data, however I wanted to avoid having a separate daemon running on my server and to avoid having to maintain two separate configurations regarding user database.

As a result of this, I ended up writing an extension for maildrop, that would allow it to do user lookups against Dovecot in a similar way how they are done now against Courier Authlib. And as a token of my appreciation, I'm releasing my code to the public. For everyone that may be interested in this extension, a patch against maildrop version 2.0.4 can be downloaded from the following location: http://www.max.rs/ozone/maildrop-2.0.4-dovecotauth.patch.txt The socket communication code was based on code from Courier Authlib, while the rest of the code that implements actual communication protocol is written with simplicity in mind and tries to follow the coding style of the rest of maildrop's source. The source code itself should be easy to comprehend if someone would want to look at it in a more detail.

When this patch is applied, maildrop will be extended with another command line option "-t", which can be used to specify the location of Dovecot's master auth socket that would be used when performing user lookups. This extension can coexist with Courier Authlib compiled at the same time, when option "-t" is not specified maildrop would behave as usual. There's a readme file (README.dovecotauth) together with patch with a little bit more information regarding the use of this extension.

I hope that some of you may find my extension useful and that it may even get included together with maildrop in the future.

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