Cyrus, LDAP, and attributes

[Nick Hodulik]

After much gnashing of teeth (which I fully documented! A HOWTO will 
follow at some point) I have managed to get a Cyrus Imapd 2.2.8 + 
Postfix 2 + LDAP + Amavis + Spamassassin + DSPAM + ClamAV + Virtual 
Domains setup nearly working. One of my final tasks is being able to 
create catchall addresses. I've spent hours and hour searching for 
this, so I figured I would finally just ask. :-)

I am thoroughly confused by the imapd.conf man page. Most other tools 
that query LDAP (including tools such as ldapsearch and Postfix) ask 
for two things: a filter and a resultant attribute. From my 
understanding this model is loosely equivalent to a SQL SELECT 
statement wherein you have something like "SELECT attribute FROM ldap 
WHERE filter", meaning that the filter is like a where clause for 
returning the matching records and the attribute represents the final 
data you need to get your task accomplished.

So in Postfix (for example) you have:
query_filter = (|(mail=%s)(mailAlias=%s))
result_attribute = mailLocalAddress

and in LDAP:
mail=user at domain.tld
mailAlias=guy at domain.tld
mailAlias=@domain.tld
mailLocalAddress=user at domain.tld

In this instance LDAP will search through all of the LDAP directory for 
a match for mail or mailAlias and when it finds a match will return the 
value of mailLocalAddress to Postfix, which will then use that to 
deliver the message to Cyrus.

 From what I can tell Cyrus doesn't do this: there is no attribute 
statement that I can make sense of. Instead there is simply a filter, 
and as a result I have no idea what data LDAP spits back to it.

So my questions are:

1.) Is there a configuration option in Cyrus for something similar to 
result_attribute in Postfix?
2.) If not, exactly what data does ldap_filter return? Using Cyrus, how 
would I accomplish the same result I would get from the above example 
in Postfix?
3.) Am I asking the wrong question? :-)

Thanks for anyone's help.

Nick Hodulik
Low Fat Technology

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