Postfix, VDA, Dovecote, LDAP, Phamm...

Ville Walveranta

Hello all!

I'm rebuilding/migrating a mail system that has been running for last six years on qmail with vMailMgr to Postfix with VDA, Dovecote, OpenLDAP (and Phamm to manage LDAP). The old system is currently running FreeBSD 6.2, and the new one is 7.0.

I have Postfix installed, secured (SASL, TLS) and working. Dovecote is working and serving IMAP and POP mailboxes as well as doing the authentication. OpenLDAP is installed but not yet configured. I'm looking at the virtual domains (which I need to get running) first.

I have couple of questions regarding the virtual domains. Firstly, on the VDA page (as well as in a few other pages on the web) it is mentioned that VDA is not integrated to Postfix. But the messages that mention so are usually from 2004 or 2005. Is this still the case? When I installed Postfix, there was an option (which I selected) to include VDA. Is this the same VDA patch (`man 8 virtual' also apparently provides information about the same system)? Postfix provides some internal virtual domain functionality as well, so is there still point to using the VDA patch -- does it offer functionality not offered by Postfix's internal virtual domain features? I want to be able to manage the virtual domains through LDAP, so that may (?) be a feature the VDA patch is needed.

So I selected VDA during install, compiled, and installed Postfix. Now when I try to look up one of the VDA configuration parameters such as virtual_mailbox_base, the parameter is not recognized:

Google