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Section: Dovecot ()
Updated: February 2026
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doveco-lda- Dovecot's local mail delivery agent

SYNOPSIS

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

DESCRIPTION

The doveco-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 doveco-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 doveco-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 mbo-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 doveco-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

doveco-lda will exit with one of the following values: 0

: Delivery was successful. (EX_OK)

: Invalid parameter given. (EX_USAGE)

: Recipient user not known. (EX_NOUSER)

: -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)

: 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/1-mail.conf

: Mailbox locations and namespaces.

/etc/dovecot/conf.d/1-lda.conf

: LDA specific settings.

/etc/dovecot/conf.d/9-plugin.conf

: Plugin specific settings.

/etc/dovecot/conf.d/9-quota.conf

: Quota configuration.

REPORTING BUGS

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