Pre-Authentificated Sessions
============================

For debugging purpose or to perform IMAP actions on-behalf of an user, one can
use pre-authentificated sessions.

Simply, one calls 'dovecot --exec-mail imap' and can speak IMAP via STDIN.

However, the call does not always populate all environment variables and one
needto setup the uid and gid /before/ the call, hence, the name "'PREAUTH'".
Secondary, the call does not drop privilegues in-the-middle, therefore
someaccess permissions, such as to log to a file, may fail. In this case, one
canuse an alternate configuration file.

So a more advanced call might look like this:

---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------
sudo -H -u user /usr/local/dovecot/sbin/dovecot \
 -c /usr/local/dovecot/etc/dovecot-cmdline.conf --exec-mail imap
* PREAUTH [CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 ...] Logged in as user
---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Note the 'PREAUTH' in the reply. Now one can speak IMAP.

The part 'sudo -H -u user' sets up the uid/gid for system users, one might need
'sudo -u vmail USER=user HOME=path' for virtual users.

(This file was created from the wiki on 2011-05-11 04:42)
