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Accomplish this using pam authentication rather than parsing the /etc/passwd file directly. PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) authenticates users against the unix passwd using the pam_unix.so module, which authenticates users from the system's shadow password file. The PAM configuration is usually in the /etc/pam.d/ directory, but some systems may use a single file, /etc/pam.conf. By default Dovecot uses dovecot as the PAM service name, so the configuration is read from /etc/pam.d/dovecot. The default installation on Redhat/Fedora/CentOS will use pam by default without you having to make changes. However, to view the configuration involved, do vi 10-auth.confwhich you will see has an include to read from 'auth-system.conf.ext' which you can view vi auth-system.conf.extLook for passdb { driver = pam }Make sure that is not remarked out. In older versions you will find these lines directly in the dovecot.conf file. No matter where they are, as long as they are part of the dovecot configuration it will use pam authentication.There are multiple authentication mechanisms available to use with dovecot. These databases can be used as ALTERNATIVES to the System users (passwd) as both password databases and user databases:* Passwd-file: /etc/passwd-like file in specified location* LDAP: Lightweight Directory Access Protocol* SQL: SQL database (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite)* Dict: Dict key-value database (Redis, memcached, etc.)* VPopMail: External software used to handle virtual domains The scope of configuration for each of this is too broad to cover in this page. Follow the links to the pages for each individual means if available.Example A: In this example we will configure postfix and dovecot for a system with a mix of unix and virtual user accounts. The example can be seen in [[Dovecot and Postfix Hybrid Authentication Example]].== Determine installed version ==From the command line: dovecot --version [[Category:Computer_Technology]][[Category:Linux]]