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Postdove Administration

Nearly all email system administration is done via postdove command. The postfix and dovecot configuration files are rarely changed after the installation is complete. Consult the postdove Commands Reference for the details of all the commands needed to administer the mail server.

Customize the Installation

The database creation gave us a basic system. It added the domains localhost and localhost.localdomain. It also added the RFC 2142 aliases, i.e. postmaster, abuse, and their friends. For most installations these are effectively constants, needed in a correct installation but rarely changed.

We will populate the database in the following order:

  1. The first thing we need to do is add the glue between postfix and dovecot. We do this by defining a transport for LMTP
[root@pobox ~]# postdove add transport dovecot --transport=lmtp --nexthop=lmtp:localhost:24
  1. Add host names for this system. These will be used along with localhost by postfix to know where to route incoming email. We also must change 'localhost.localdomain` to something sensible. Since we cannot edit the domain name, we add the new one and delete the old.
[root@pobox ~]# postdove add domain mail.home.example.com --class=local
[root@pobox ~]# postdove add domain pobox.home.example.com --class=local
[root@pobox ~]# postdove add domain localhost.example.com --class=local
[root@pobox ~]# postdove delete domain localhost.localdomain
  1. Add the domain name used for the virtual users. This type of domain must be created before any users in that domain, i.e. the domain does not automatically get added when a virtual mail user is created.
[root@pobox ~]# postdove add domain example.com --class=vmailbox --transport=dovecot

This is the postdove side of what we did when we set up the /srv/dovecot/example.com directory early on in the filesystems configuration. We could have done that work here except that we needed to get the filesystems setup correct and it was easier to do that with a /srv/dovecot directory that was not empty. If we were to create a second or subsequent virtual mailbox domain, we would do the directory creation here along with the adding the domain.

This sets up a basics for an installation. There are lots more to do in order to get something useful.

Add User Accounts

We can now add users. Note that this just adds the user to the database. Other actions must be done before the account is usable for mail. This is enough for dovecot to start serving mail. If we are moving from another email system, an easy route to bulk load accounts would be to dump the existing accounts in a format that matches the dovecot account table. We could then import that into the database.

If we were migrating existing email as well as the account, one could copy the files they were in maildir format. However, I would not recommend that path because not all maildir formats are equal and in my case, the old mail storage was in a database. The better path would be to add this new IMAP server to your user's email clients and use the client and its IMAP client service to copy or move the emails using the IMAP services which are (more or less) equal.

Add Aliases

Add aliases. These will be used by postfix to process and deliver email to dovecot. There are two types of aliases, alias and virtual. The easiest way to enter them is to import using the file format that postfix uses.