saslauthd vs auxprop

[jonr at destar.net]

I cannot wrap my mind around saslauthd and auxprop.

Does auxprop use the sasldb file to authenticate users that have been  
added using the 'saslpasswd2' command?

What is saslauthd trying to use for authentication, would it be the  
mechs shown in a 'saslauthd -v' output?

What does changing the value in the Sendmail.conf file from saslauthd  
to auxprop or vice versa doing?

Running a ps I see that saslauthd is using the shadow mech:

/usr/sbin/saslauthd -m /var/run/saslauthd -a shadow

But I have no users in the shadow file other than cyrus and my users  
for my mail server are in the sasldb file?


I have read the documentation on the cyrus site, the man pages and  
searched the mailing list but I still cannot grasp what seems to be a  
simple concept.

Can someone shed some light or at least point me in the right direction?

Jon