

Variables
=========


You can use special variables in several places: 

 * >>mail_location<< setting and >>namespace<< locations 
 * >>static userdb<< and >>passw* >>VPchanges marked with "*" character. Read them to see if there is anything that concerns you. In general all the changes try to preserve backwards compatibility, but some changes which are meant to improve the stability and correctness of the configuration could mean breaking some existing installations. And that may be a good thing, since it can expose problems which could otherwise show up as random errors. 


Upgrading between other versions
================================



 * >>v0.99.x to v1.0<< 
 * >>v1.0 to v1.1<< 

(This file was created from the wiki on 2007-12-11 04:42)
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User database extra fields
==========================


A user database lookup typically returns >>uid, gid, home and mail<< fields. Other possibilities are: 

 * *nice*: Set the mail process's priority to be the given value. 
 * *chroot*: Chroot to given directory. Overrides 'mail_chroot' setting in 'dovecot.conf'. 
 * *system_user*: If this is given, the user's groups are read from '/etc/group' (or wherever NSS is configured to taken them from). 
 * It's possible to override settings from 'dovecot.conf'. 
These fields can be returned the exact same way as uid, gid, home and mail fields. Below are examples for some user databases. 


Overriding settings
===================


Most commonly settings are overridden from plugin section. For example if your plugin section has 'quota=maildir:storage=1024' value and the userdb lookup returns 'quota=maildir:storage=2048', the original quota setting gets overridden. In fact if the lookup always returns a quota field, there's no point in having the quota setting in plugin section at all, because it always gets overridden anyway. 
To understand how imap and pop3 processes see their settings, it may be helpful to know how Dovecot internally passes them: 

 1. All actual settings are first placed into environment variables. The environment name may be different than the setting name. 
 2. Everything inside plugin section is placed into environment variables. >>%variables<< in values are expanded first. 
 3. Everything from userdb lookup is placed into environment variables. 
 4. At this point if >>post-login scripting is used<<, it may modify the environment if wanted. 
 5. imap/pop3 reads 