Dovecot configurations

Dovecot has two major configuration files (/etc/dovecot/) within our solution. First one is the default dovecot configuration file dovecot.conf and other one, dovecot-ldap configuration file dovecot-ldap.conf.ext. It is necessary to install dovecot-ldap plugin in order to use OpenLDAP with dovecot. There are folder called conf.d which contain several highly important configuration files also.

dovecot.conf

Most of the default settings(configurations) are listed here and there are some commented configurations also. They can be uncommented or you can add new configurations as your requirements. Lets discus our configurations.

• auth_mechanism

  The simplest authentication mechanism is PLAIN. The client simply sends the password unencrypted to Dovecot. All clients support the PLAIN mechanism, but obviously there's the problem that anyone listening on the network can steal the password. For that reason (and some others) other mechanisms were implemented.

• protocols

  Which protocols dovecot must support.

• listen

  Which protocols dovecot must listen.

• log_path

  Where dovecot logs are saved.

dovecot-ldap.conf.ext

Main dovecot-ldap configuration file.

• hosts

  Space separated list of LDAP hosts to use. host:port is allowed too.

• dn

  Distinguished Name - the username used to login to the LDAP server.

• dnpass

  Password for LDAP server.

• auth_bind

  Use authentication binding for verifying password's validity. This works by logging into LDAP server using the username and password given by client.

• auth_bind_userdn

  If authentication binding is used, you can save one LDAP request per login if users' DN can be specified with a common template. The template can use the standard %variables (see user_filter). Note that you can't use any pass_attrs if you use this setting.

• base

  LDAP user's base variable. User group, domain etc... (Eg: base = ou=users,dc=coppermail,dc=dyndns,dc=org)

• user_attrs, user_filter, pass_attrs and pass_filter

  All of these parameters are used with auth_bind.

• debug_level

  LDAP library debug level. How deep should debug and logging process work.