NAME

dovecot-lda - Dovecot's local mail delivery agent

SYNOPSIS

dovecot-lda [-ek] [-a address] [-c config_file] [-d username] [-f envelope_sender] [-m mailbox] [-o setting=value] [-p path] [-r address]

DESCRIPTION

The dovecot-lda is a local mail delivery agent which takes mail from an MTA and delivers it to a user's mailbox, while keeping Dovecot index files up to date.

Main features of the dovecot-lda are:

Mailbox indexing during mail delivery, providing faster mailbox access later
Quota enforcing by the quota plugin
Sieve language support by the Pigeonhole sieve plugin

OPTIONS

Options accepted by dovecot-lda:

-a address

Destination address (e.g. user+ext@domain). If not specified, default is based on the lda_original_recipient_header setting setting.

-c config_file

Alternative configuration file path.

-d username

Destination username. If given, the user information is looked up from userdb. Typically used with virtual users, but not necessarily with system users.

-e

If mail gets rejected, write the rejection reason to stderr and exit with status 77 (EX_NOPERM). The default is to send a rejection mail ourself.

-f envelope_sender

Envelope sender address. If not specified and message data begins with a valid mbox-style "From " line, the address is taken from it.

-k

Don't clear all environment at startup.

-m mailbox

). If the mailbox doesn't exist, it will not be created (unless lda_mailbox_autocreate setting). If a message couldn't be saved to the

If Sieve plugin is used, this mailbox is used as the keep action's mailbox. It's also used if there is no Sieve script or if the script fails for some reason.
Deliveries to namespace prefix will result in saving the mail to INBOX instead. For example if you have Mail/ namespace, this allows you to specify dovecot-lda -m Mail/$mailbox where mail is stored to Mail/$mailbox or to INBOX if $mailbox is empty.
directory, your namespace configuration is namespace_prefix setting and namespace_separator setting, the correct way to deliver mail there is to use

-o setting=value

Overrides the configuration setting from /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf and from the userdb with the given value. In order to override multiple settings, the -o option may be specified multiple times.

-p path

Path to the mail to be delivered instead of reading from stdin. If using maildir the file is hard linked to the destination if possible. This allows a single mail to be delivered to multiple users using hard links, but currently it also prevents deliver from updating cache file so it shouldn't be used unless really necessary.

-r address

Final envelope recipient address. Defaults to -a address, but may differ if, e.g., aliases are used or when dropping the +detail part.

EXIT STATUS

dovecot-lda will exit with one of the following values:

0

Delivery was successful. (EX_OK)

64

Invalid parameter given. (EX_USAGE)

67

Recipient user not known. (EX_NOUSER)

77

-e option was used and mail was rejected. Typically this happens when user is over quota and quota_full_tempfail = no is configured. (EX_NOPERM)

75

A temporary failure. This is returned for almost all failures. See the log file for details. (EX_TEMPFAIL)

FILES

/etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf

Dovecot's main configuration file.

/etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf

Mailbox locations and namespaces.

/etc/dovecot/conf.d/15-lda.conf

LDA specific settings.

/etc/dovecot/conf.d/90-plugin.conf

Plugin specific settings.

/etc/dovecot/conf.d/90-quota.conf

Quota configuration.

REPORTING BUGS

Report bugs, including doveconf -n output, to the Dovecot Mailing List ⟨dovecot@dovecot.org⟩. Information about reporting bugs is available at: https://dovecot.org/bugreport.html