[HowTo] Replace courier with dovecot

[aseques]

Hi, if the passwords are stored in a know encryption method (haven't look at it in deep yet), it wouldn't be faster to user dovecot directly to check the passwords?
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but if every time a pop connection is established there has to be a perl script connecting to the database and retrieving the user info, doing it natively with dovecot + mysql would be less cost expensive I guess.
At the moment I don't have any production server using post-encription release so I haven't look at it yet.

What's your opinion?