> There doesn't appear to be a way to say "here is user and this is his > email address". It seems to be assumed that user "Fred" will have an > email > address of "fred@..." and no way to override that.
That is not how dovecot works. Dovecot goes "here is this authenticated user and they are allowed to view mail in this inbox/directory". You specify in config how someone is authenticated then you tell config the path to the mbox or maildir/ that user can access. Dovecot doesn't see email addresses, it just see's authenticated users. Id doesn't care if you were authenticated by the username "f...@domain.com" or "fredIsCool". The email exist only in your mind, to dovecot it's just a string to match with a password. Mail doesn't "belong" to or is "owned" by an email address. You can take mail files out of one maildir/ path and dump them into someone else's maildir/ and now that 2nd person can access those emails. In the config, you normally would say something like "f...@domain.com" has access to "/var/spool/mail/domain.com/fred/" Or "f...@domain.com" has access to "/home/fred/mail/" depending how you set your system up. You can just as easy say "fredIsCool" has access to "/var/spool/mail/domain.com/fred/" If you want to give fred someone else's mailbox you can say "f...@domain.com" has access to "/var/spool/mail/domain.com/bob/" and next time fred logs in he will see bob's emails. Just remember, the concept of email addresses is only in your mind. Dovecot simply maps "authenticated user" to a directory of your choice set in config. Now if you just do the bare minimum of telling dovecot the path to the files **IS** the name of authenticated user, then sure the path would obviously be the same as the named used to login. But you can get more complicated, for example using SQL, one column has the username "fred" or "f...@domain.com" and another column can be the path to his emails. Then you are not limited to the path having to match the username. You might also be able to hard code names and paths in flat files without having to setup a database.
