Dovecot basics

I found exhausting to configure dovecot. So this text is a try to give very basic config you can boldly start with.

First of all you should understand what dovecot exactly does.

Dovecot implements imap, pop and lmtp. That’s all (I consionsly miss sieve here for this is quite different topic).

So dovecot needs to authentificate users (passdb driver) and give access to each user mail dirs (userdb driver). That’s generaly all settings you should have except general settings such as tls or helping settings such as logging. Let’s take a look at basic Dovecot config structure. You can find whole file here.

Config

I prefer to have all config in one file rather than jumping over conf.d. So I usualy disable conf.d include and use local.conf in main dovecot.conf file like this:

  #!include conf.d/*.conf
  !include_try local.conf

# SSL section

   ssl_cert = </path/to/crt \# mind the < sign
   ssl_key  = </path/to/key

   ssl_min_protocol = TLSv1.2
   ssl_prefer_server_ciphers = yes

# Protocols section

   protocols = lmtp imap
   protocol imap {
     mail_plugins = $mail_plugins imap_sieve
     mail_max_userip_connections = 25
   }

# Services section

   service lmtp {
   	       unix_listener lmtp {
           }
       }

   service imap-login {
   	       inet_listener imaps {
           port = 993
           }
       }

# Passdb, Userdb sections

passdb {
   driver = passwd # use passwd-file for separate file in /etc/passwd format
   # driver = bsdauth # bsd analogue for passwd
   # args = scheme=SHA512-CRYPT username_format=%u /etc/dovecot/users
}

userdb {
    driver = passwd
	override_fields = home=/var/mail/%u/
   # args = username_format=%u /etc/dovecot/users
}

# Maildir section

mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir

Logging

By default dovecot writes logs to syslog with default mail facility. You can redirect logs in your sysylog configuration. Another posibility is to use log_path instruction for writing to file. See more in documentation.

Basic Commands

# Get all current settings

doveconf -a

# Get non-default settings

doveconf -nP

# Get default param values

doveconf -d

# Generate password with doveadm

doveadm pw -s SHA512

# Find log path with current setup

doveadm log find

# Get built options (useful when dovecot is installed from package)

dovecot –build-options